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The Evolution of apan. 


BEING THE 
LOWELL LECTURES 
DELIVERED AT BOSTON, MASS., APRIL, 1893, BY 


Professor henry Drummond 


EDITED BY 
WILLIAM TEMPLETON. 


PHILADELPHIA 
HENRYWALLEMUS 
1893 


Copyrighted, 1893, by 
HENRY ALTEMUS. 


“ 


ALTEMUS’ BOOKBINDERY, 


PHILADELPHIA, 





, Us ie! € ¥ 





Contents, 


THE EVOLUTION OF MAN - - . - 2g 


THE ARREST OF THE ANIMAL BODY OF 


MAN - $ - : r 109 


THE RESIDUUM OF THE ANIMAL IN MAN 135 


THE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE : - - 169 
THE EVOLUTION OF MIND - - - - 189 
THE EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGE - - 213 
THE EVOLUTION OF SEX - : - - 235 
THE EVOLUTION OF A MOTHER - - 247 





fntroduction, 





Mntroduction. 
Pror. DRUMMOND never says any- 


thing that is not both interesting and 


valuable. He is the foremost living 
member of that group of writers which 
may be generally called the reconcilers 
of religion and science. Since Butler, 
the author of the ‘‘Analogy of Religion 
atidue oClence,. athere ©71s no. ‘clerical 


thinker who has produced so profound 
(19) 


20 Sntroduction. 
an impression upon the class of doubters 
who were willing and eager to be con- 
vinced. | 

The fight, or the apparent fight, be- 
tween Religion and Science is an old 
one. Science is contimually making 
discoveries which seem to oppose the 
current dogmas of faith. Science, for 
exainple, discovers that the earth is a 
globe and revolves around -the sun. 
Straightway there is a hubbub amongst 
the )}doginatists. . Text after’ textwae 
quoted from the Bible to prove that 


Science must be wrong. Then the 


Sntroduction. 24 
Reconciler steps in. to show that Scrip- 
ture, properly interpreted, does not 
mean what the dogmatists asserted. 
Again, Science discovers that the arth 
has existed for millions of years. An- 
other hubbub among the dogmatists! 
According to their interpretation of 
Biblical chronology the earth has ex- 
isted for just about six thousand years. 
sLhen; the  Reconciler by referetice: to 
the Sanscrit original, shows that the 
six days of creation undoubtedly mean. 
six geological periods of indefinite. 


length, and that there is no real antago- 


22 gntroduction. 

nism in the assertion made by Science. 
And so-the conflict goes on with the 
progress of the views and the increase 
in man’s knowledge. 

When the theory of evolution—the 
so-called Darwinian theory which has 
‘been endorsed and elaborated by Hux- 
ley and Herbert Spencer—when this 
theory was first promulgated there was 
dismay and anger and disgust in the 
religious camp. That man should be 
descended in a straight, orderly and un- 
broken line from the animal, that his 


creation was not a special fiat of the 


! Introduction. 23 
Almighty, but that he and the entire 
universe are the result of a gradual pro- 
cess of evolution resulting from certain 
laws inherent in matter itself—these 
new ideas struck the dogmatists as 
hideous and appalling heresies. To 
allow them would be to disallow the 
Bible, religion and God. 

Yet slowly but surely the reconcilia- 
tion between religion and these strange, 
new theories has been going on. Not 
that all theologians are agreed on what 
to accept or what to reject. But all 


theologians do now agree that even that 


r 


2d. Fntroduction. 
portion of the doctrine which they re- 
ject is entitled to respect. 

Professor Drummond is no ordinary 
theologian. He is ahead of all his fel- 
lows. He boldly accepts the doctrine 
of evolution. He accepts it in its en- 
tirety. “Fle goesieven further \ ie wage 
tempts to show how the same laws 
which science has discovered in the 
phenomena of nature continue and can - 
be traced in the phenomena of the 
spiritual, that evolution is not only true 
of the body, but also of the soul. 


Of course his attitude has dismayed 


Introduction, 25 
many of his more conservative brethren. 
Evangelicals did not at once know how 
to take him. They could not be quite 
sure whether he was for or against them. 
Indeed the narrower portion of them still 
look upon him asa decidedly dangerous 
heretic. But a large proportion of 
thoughtful, conscientious and earnest 
Christians, wavering in their faith be- 
cause of the new light which ‘science 
had thrown upon religion, have given 
an eager welcome to his teachings and 
have found in them the solution of their 


doubts. 


26 Introduction. 

Born in 1852, Professor Drummond 1s 
a comparatively young man ; he is still in 
the dawn of his powers. It is signifi- 
cant of his modesty that his published 
books represent only the merest fraction 
of his intellectual life-work. Asa writer 
his style is vigorous and simple. He 
expresses himself with a robust. sin- 
cerity that, colvinces as seavellemes 
thrills. 

This little book is made up from the 
contemporary reports of the lectures re- 
cently delivered by Professor Drum- 


mond in the Boston Institute. ‘hese 


Introduction. 27 
reports have been carefully collated and 
edited and are presented to the reader 
with the certainty that they will prove 


of interest and value. 


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Che wvolution of Man. 





Che Evolution of aman. 


In these lectures I propose to intro- 
duce you to a few of the more recent 
facts bearing upon the Ascent of Man. I 
have chosen the subject not only because 
Evolution is the great word of this 
closing century, nor because the Evolu- 
tion of Man is the noblest theme of 
which science can ever speak, but 
because, singular though the omission 


might seem, no connected account of 
G1) 


32 The Evolution of Man. 


this great drama exists at the present 
time. | 

In the monographs of Minot and His, - 
the Embryology of Man has received a 
just expression ; Darwin and Haeckel 
have traced the origin of the Animal-_ 
Body ; the researches of Romanes mark 
a beginning with the Evolution of 
Mind ; Herbert Spencer has elaborated 
theories of the development of Morals ; 
Edward Caird of the Evolution of 
Religion. Supplementing the contri- 
butions of these authorities, some veri-. 
fying, some criticising, some combating, . 
some rebutting, area multitude of others 


who have devoted their lives to the 


The Evolution of Man. 38 


same rich problems. But these re- 
searches, preliminary reconnaisances 
though they be, are worthy of being 
looked upon as a whole. No one can 
say that this multitude of observers are 
not in earnest, nor their work honest, 
nor their methods competent to the 
last powers of science. What they see 
in the unexplored land in which they 
travel belongs to the world. Like the 
work of all pioneers, it is at least a be- 
ginning, and must be treated with 
respect. By just such methods, and by 
just such men, the map of the world of 
thought is filled in—here from the 


tracing up of some great river, there 
3 


34 The Evolution of Man. 


from a bearing taken roughly in a 
darkened sky, yonder from a sudden 
glint of the sun, caught by a quick eye 
on a far-off mountain peak, here by a 
swift induction of an adventurous mind 
from a momentary glimpse of a natural 
law. Ina century which has added to 
the sum of human learning more than 
all the centuries that have gone before, 
it is not to be conceived that on the 
highest themes of all some further reve- 
lation should not be vouchsafed to man. 

Now that the first rash rush of the 
evolutionary invasion is past, and the 
sins of its youth atoned for by sober 


concession, Evolution is seen to be little 


The Evolution of fan. 35 


more than the story of creation as told 
by those who know it best. ‘‘ Evolu- 
tion,’’ says Mr. Huxley, ‘‘or develop- 
ment, is at present employed in biology 
as a general name for the history of the 
steps by which any living being has 
acquired the morphological and the 
physiological characters which distin- 
guish it.’ Though applied specifically ° 
to plants and animals, this definition 
expresses the chief sense in which Evolu- 
tion is to be used scientifically at present. 

After all the ink spilt, Evolution is 
simply ‘‘history,’’ a ‘‘ history of steps,’’ 
a ‘“‘general name”? for the history of 


the steps by which the world has come 


36 The Evolution of Man. 


to be what it is. According to this 
definition, the story of Evolution is. 
narrative. It may be wrongly told ; it 
may be colored, exaggerated, over- or 
under-stated, like the record of any 
other set of facts ; it may be told with 
a theological bias, or with an anti-theo- 
logical bias; theories of the process 
‘may be added by this thinker or by 
that; but none of these are of the 
substance of the story. Whether history 
is told by a Gibbon or a Green the facts 
remain, and whether Evolution be told 
by a Haeckel or a Wallace, we accept 
the narrative so far as it isa rendering 


of Nature, and no more. 


The Evolution of Man. 37 


It is true, before this story can be 
fully told, centuries still must pass. At 
present there is not a chapter of the 
record that is not incomplete, nota page 
that is wholly finished. The manuscript 
is already worn with erasures, the 
writing is often blurred, the very lan- 
guageisuncouthand strange. Yet even 
now the outline of a continued story 
is beginning to appear—a story whose 
chief credentials lie in the fact that no 
imagination of man could have designed 
a spectacle so wonderful, or worked out 
a plot at once so intricate and so tran- 


scendently simple. 


38 The Evolution of Man. 


THE RIGHTFUL CLAIM OF SCIENCE. 


The day is past when one need apolo- 
gize for treating Man as an object of 
scientific research. Hamlet’s ‘‘ being 
of large discourse looking before and 
after’’ is, withal, a part of nature, and 
can neither be made larger nor smaller, 
anticipate less or prophesy less, because 
we investigate, and perhaps discover, 
his pedigree. And should his pedigree 
be proved to be related in undreamed- 
of ways to that of all other things in 
nature, ‘all other things’’ have that to 
gain by the alliance which philosophy 


and theology have often wished to dower 


Rigbttul Claim of Science. 39 


them with, but could never lawfully do. 
Every step in the proof of the oneness 
in an evolutionary process of this divine 
humanity of ours with all lower things 
in nature is a step in the proof of the 
divinity of all lower things. 

If Evolution can be proved to include 
Man, from that moment the whole course 
of Evolution and the whole scheme of na- 
ture assume a new significance. The be- 
ginning must then be interpreted from 
the end, not the end from the beginning. 
All that is found in the product must be 
put into the process. Few things are 


more needed at the present hour than a 


40 The Evolution of Man. 


readjustment of the accents in telling 
the story of Evolution. 
Largely because the theory of develop- 
ment became known to the popular 
mind through the limited form of 
Darwinism, the whole subject began 
out of focus, was first seen by the world 
out of focus, and has remained out of 
‘focus to the present day. Darwinism 
on its own levels, modified, doubtless, 
by time, may prove to be true; its princi- 
ples, when extended to other levels and 
balanced with whatever other principles 
are found there, may also prove to be 
_ true; but when they are allowed to 


enter those other regions alone, with 


Rightful Claim of Science. AL 


the emphasis unchanged, without allow- 
ing for new factors and new forces, they 
become false and pernicious. An 
Evolution theory which includes Man 
drawn to scale and with the lights and 
shadows properly adjusted—adjusted to 
the whole truth and reality of nature— 
is needed as a standard for modern 
thought, and when it comes, it must 
make impossible all those inversions and 
perversions which interpret everything 
from beneath. An engineering workshop 
is unintelligible until we reach the room 
where the completed engine stands. 
Everything culminates in that final pro- 


duct, is contained in it, is explained by it. 


42 The Evolution of Man. 


The Evolution of Man also is the 
complement and corrective of all other 
forms of Evolution. From this height 
only is there a full view, a true perspec- 
tive, a consistent world. ‘The whole 
mistake of naturalism has been to in- 
terpret nature from the standpoint of 
the atom—to study the machinery which 
drives this great moving world simply 
as machinery, forgetting that the ship 
has any passengers, or the passengers 
any captain, or the captain any course. 
It is as great a mistake, on the other 
hand, for the theologian to separate the 
ship from the passengers as for the 


naturalist to separate the passengers 


Rigbtful Claim of Science. 43 


from the ship. It is he who cannot 
include Man among the links of Evolu- 
tion who has greatly to fear the theory 
of development. In his jealousy for 
that religion which seems to him higher 
than science, he removes at once the 
rational basis from religion and the 
legitimate crown from science, for- 
getting that in doing so, with whatever 
satisfaction to himself, he offers to the 
world an unnatural religion and an 
inhuman science. ‘The cure for all the 
small mental disorders which spring up 
around restricted applications of Evolu- 
tion is to extend it fearlessly in all 


directions as far as the mind can carry 


44 The Evolution of Man. 


it and the facts allow, till each man, 
working at his subordinate part, is com- 
pelled to own, and adjust himself to, 
the whole. 


THE RIGHTFUL CLAIM OF THEOLOGY. 


If the theological mind be called upon © 
to make this expansion, the scientific 
man also must be asked to enlarge his 
views in another direction. If he in- 
sists upon including Man in his scheme 
of Evolution, he must see to it that he 
include the whole Man. For him at 


least no form of Evolution is scientific 


- Rightful Claim of Theology. 45 


or is to be considered, which does not 
include the whole Man, and all that is 
in Man and all the work and thought 
and life and aspiration of Man. ‘The 
great moral facts, the moral forces so 
far as they are proved to exist, the moral 
consciousness so far as it is real, must 
coine within this scope. Human History 
must be as much a part of it as Natural 
History. ‘Thesocial and religious forces 
must no more be left outside it than the 
forces of gravitation or of life. 

The reason why the naturalist does 
not usually include these among the 
factors in Evolution is not oversight, but 


undersight. Sometimes, no doubt, he 


AG The Evolution of Aan. 


may take at their word those who assure 
him that Evolution has nothing to do 
with those higher things, but the main 
reason is simply that his work does not 
lie on the levels where those forces come 
into play. ‘The specialist is not to be 
blamed for this; limitation is his 
strength. But when the specialist pro- 
ceeds to reconstruct the universe from 
his little corner of it, and especially. 
from his level of it, he not only injures 
science and philosophy, but he may 
fatally mislead his neighbors. The 
man who is busy with the stars will 
never come across Natural Selection, 


yet surely must he allow for Natural 


Rigbtful Claim of Theology. Aq 


Selection in his construction of the 
world asa whole. He who works among 
star-fish will encounter little of Mental 
Evolution, yet will he not deny that it 
exists. The stars have voices, but there 
are other voices; the star-fishes have 
activities, but there are other activities. 
Man, body, soul, spirit, are not only to 
be considered, but are first to be consid- 
ered in any theory of the world. You 
cannot describe the life of kings, or 
arrange their kingdoms, from the cellar 
beneath the palace. ‘‘ Art,’? as Brown- 


ing reminds us, 


*‘Must fumble for the whole, once fixing on a 
part, 


48 The Evolution of Man. 


However poor, surpass the fragment, and aspire 
To reconstruct thereby the ultimate entire.” 


Or, to make the application in the wise 
words of Bacon, ‘‘ This I dare affirm in 
knowledge of Nature, that a little natu- 
ral philosophy, and the first entrance 
into it, doth dispose the opinion to 
atheism, but on the other side, much 
natural philosophy, and wading deep 
into it, will bring about men’s minds to 


religion.’? (Meditationes Sacrae X.) 


DOGMATISM FORBIDDEN. 


To give an account of Evolution, it 


Dogmatism Forbidden. 49 


need scarcely be remarked, is not to 
account for it. No living thinker has 
yet found it possible to account for 
Evolution. Mr. Herbert Spencer’s cel- 


ebrated definition of Evolution as ‘‘ 


a 
change from an indefinite coherent heter- 
ogeneity to a definite coherent hetero- 
geneity through continuous differentia- 
tions and integrations ’’—the formula of 
which the Contemporary Review re- 
marked that ‘‘the universe may well 
have heaved a sigh of relief when, 
through the cerebration of an eminent 
thinker, it had been delivered of this 
account of itself ’?—is simply a summary 


of results, and throws no light, though 
ji | 


50 The Evolution of Man. 


it is often supposed to do so, upon ulti- 
mate causes. While it is true, as Mr. 
Wallace says in his latest work, that 
“Descent with modification is now 
universally accepted as the order of 
nature in the organic world,’’ there is 
everywhere at this moment the most 
disturbing uncertainty as to how the 
Ascent even of species has been brought 
about. 

The attacks on the Darwinian theory 
from the outside were never so keen as 
are the controversies now raging in 
scientific circles, over the fundamental 
principles of Darwinism itself. On at 


least two main points—sexual selection 


Dogmatism Forbidden. 51 


and the origin of the higher mental 
characteristics of man—Mr. Alfred Rus- 
sel Wallace, co-discoverer with Darwin 
of the principle of Natural Selection 
though he be, directly antagonizes his 
colleague. The powerful attack of 
Weismann on the Darwinian assumption 
of the inheritability of acquired char- 
acters has opened one of the liveliest 
controversies of recent years, and the 
whole field of science is hot with con- 
troversies and discussions. In his‘‘Germ- 
Plasm,’’ just published, the German 
naturalist believes himself to have finally 
disposed of both Darwin’s ‘‘ germules”’ 


and Herbert Spencer’s ‘‘ primordial 


52 The Evolution of Aan. 


_units,’? while Eimer breaks a lance 
with Weismann in defence of Darwin, 
and Herbert Spencer in the Conxtempora- 
ry Review for March replies for himself, 
assuring us that ‘‘either there has been 
inheritance of acquired characters or 
there has been no evolution.’ It is the 
greatest tribute to Darwinism that it 
should have survived to deserve this 
era of criticism. Meantime all prudent 
men can do no other than hold their 
judgment in suspense both as to that 
specific theory of one department of 
Evolution which is called Darwinism, 
and as to the factors and causes of 


Evolution itself. 


Dogmatism Forbidden. 53 


No one asks more of Evolution at 
present than permission to use it as a 
working theory. Without some hy- 
pothesis no work can ever be done, and, 
as all know, many of the greatest con- 
tributions to human knowledge have 
been made by the use of theories either 
themselves imperfect or demonstrably 
false. ‘This is the age of the evolution 
of evolution. All thoughts that the 
evolutionist works with, all theories 
and generalizations, have been them- 
selves evolved and are now being 
evolved. Even were his theory per- 
fected its first lesson would be that it 


was itself but a phase of the evolution 


54 The Evolution of Man. 


of further opinion, no more fixed than 
a species, no more final than the theory 
which it displaced. Of all men the 
Evolutionist, by the very nature of his 
calling, the mere tools of his craft, his 
understanding of his hourly shifting 
place in this always moving and ever 
more mysterious world, must be humble, 


tolerant, and undogmatic. 


THE VISION OF EVOLUTION. 


Nevertheless these are cold words 
with which to speak of a Vision—for 
Evolution is after all a Vision—which 


is revolutionizing the world of Nature 


Vision of Evolution. 90 
and of thought, and, within living 
memery, has opened 3 up avenues into 
the past and vistas into the future such 
as science has never witnessed before. 
While many of the details of the theory 
of Evolution are in the crucible of criti- 
cism, and while the field of modern 
science changes with such rapidity that 
in almost every department the text- 
books of ten years ago are obsolete to- 
day, it is fair to add that no one of these 
changes, nor all of them together, have 
touched the general theory itself except 
to establish its strength, its value, and 
its universality. 


Even more tremarkable than the 


56 The Evolution of Man. 


rapidity of its conquest is the author- 
ity with which the doctrine of De- 
velopment has seemed to speak to 
the most authoritative minds of our 
time. Of those who are in the front 
rank, of those who have, by common 
consent, the right to speak, there are 
scarcely any who do not in some form 
employ it in working and in thinking. 
Authority may mean little; the world 
has often been mistaken; but when 
minds so different as those of Charles 
Darwin or of John Richard Green, of 
Herbert Spencer or of Robett Brown- 
ing, build half the labors of their life 


on this one law, it is impossible,‘ es- 


Wision of Evolution. bY 


pecially in the absence of any other 
even competing principle at the present 
hour, to treat it as a baseless dream. 
Only the peculiar nature of this great 
generalization can account for the ex- 
traordinary enthusiasm of this accept- 
ance. Evolution involves not so much 
a change of opinion as a change in 
man’s whole view of the world and of 
life. It is not the statement of a mathe- 
matical proposition which men are 
called upon to declare true or false. It 
is a method of looking upon Nature. 
Science for centuries devoted itself to 
the cataloguing of facts and the dis- 


covery of laws. Hach worker toiled in 


58 The Evolution of Man. 


his own little place—the geologist in 
his quarry, the botanist in his garden, 
the biologist in his laboratory, the as- 
tronomer in his observatory, the his- 
torian in his library, the archeologist 
in his museum. Suddenly these work- 
ers looked up; they spoke to one an- 
other; they had each discovered a law; 
they whispered its name. It was the 
same word that went round. They had 
each discovered Evolution. Henceforth 
their work was one, science was one, 
the world was one, and mind, which 


discovered the oneness, was one. 


All Things are Rising. 59 


ALL THINGS ARE RISING. 


But this is not the whole result of 
this discovery. ‘The doctrine of Evolu- 
tion has ushered a new hope into the 
world. Nature is to be read not only 
with the eyes, but with the mind ot 
only with the mind, but with the soul. 
If Man, and all that is in Man, are to 
be the subjects of Evolution, Man and 
all that is in Man must view the proc- 
ess, must form the audience, must pro- 
nounce upon the meaning or the mean- 
inglessness of the spectacle. Sum- 
moned to this task, the whole man sum- 


moned, there can be but one verdict as 


60 The Evolution of fan. 


to the import of Evolution, as to its 
bearing upon the individual life, and 
the future of the race. The supreme 
message of Science to this age is 
that all Nature is on the side of the 
man who tries to rise. Evolution, de- 
velopment, progress are not only on her 
programme, these are her programme. 
For all things are rising, all worlds, all 
planets, all stars and suns. An ascend- 
ing energy is in the universe, and the 
whole moves on with one mighty idea 
and anticipation. The aspiration in 
the human mind and heart is but the 
evolutionary tendency of the universe 


becoming conscious. Darwin’s great 


ope of Evolution. 61 


discovery, or the discovery which he 
heralded, is the same as Galileo’s—that 
the world moves. The Italian prophet 
‘said it moves from west to east; the 
English philosopher said it moves from 
low to high. And this is the last and 
most splendid contribution of Science 
to the faith of the world. 


THE HOPE OF EVOLUTION. 


The discovery of a second motion in 
the earth has come into the world of 
thought only in time to save it from 
despair. As in the days of Galileo, 


there are many even now who do not 


62 The Evolution of Man. 


see that the world moves—men to whom 
the earth is but an endless plain, a 
prison fixed in a purposeless universe 
where untried prisoners await their un- 
known fate. It is not the monotony of 
life which destroys men, but its point- 
lessness ; they can bear its weight, its 
meaninglessness crushes them. But 
the same great revolution that the dis- 
covery of the axial rotation of the earth 
effected in the realm of physics, the 
announcement of the doctrine of Evo- 
lution makes in the moral world. Al- 
ready, even in these days of its dawn, 
a sudden and marvellous light has fallen 


upon earth and heaven. Evolution is 


bope of Evolution, 63 


less a doctrine than a light; it isa light 
revealing in the chaos of the past a per- 
fect and growing order, giving meaning 
even to the confusion of the present, 
discovering through all the deviousness 
around us the paths of progress and 
flashing its rays already upon a coming 
goal. 

Men begin to see an undeviating 
ethical purpose in this material world, 
a tide, that from eternity has never 
turned, making for perfectness. In that 
vast progression of Nature, that vision of 
all things from the first of time moving 
from low to high, from incomplete- 


ness to completeness, from imperfection 


64 The Evolution of Man. 


to perfection, the moral nature recog- 
nizes in all its height and depth the 
eternal claim upon itself. Wholeness 
and perfection—Holiness and Right- 
eousness—these have always been re- 
quired of Man. But never before on 
the natural plane have they been 
proclaimed by voices so commanding, 
or enforced by sanctions so great and 
rational. 

‘‘’The study of the historical develop- 
ment of man,’’ says Prof: Edward 
Caird,. “‘especially,.in respect of his 
higher life, is not only a matter of ex- 
ternal or merely speculative curiosity ; 


it is closely connected with the devel- 


Dope of Evolution. 65 


opment of that life in ourselves. For 
we learn to know ourselves, first of all, 
in the mirror of the world ; or, in other 
words, our knowledge of our own na- 
ture and of its possibilities grows and 
deepens with our understanding of what 
is without us, and most of all with our 
understanding of the general history of 
man. It has often been noticed that 
there is a certain analogy between the 
life of the individual and that of the 
race, and even that the life of the indi- 
vidual is a sort of epitome of the his- 
tory of humanity. But, as Plato al- 
ready discovered, it is by reading the 


large letters that we learn to interpret 
; 


66 Tbe Evolution of Aan. 


the small. . . . It is only through a 
deepened consciousness of the world 
that the human spirit can solve its own 
problem. Especially is this true in the 
region of anthropology. For the inner 
life of the individual is deep and full 
just in proportion to the width of his 
relations to other men and things; and 
his consciousness of what he is in him- 
self as a spiritual being is dependent on 
a comprehension of the position of his_ 
individual life in the great secular 
process by which the intellectual and | 
moral life of humanity has grown and 
1s growing. Hence the highest practi- 


cal, as well as speculative, interests of 


Evolution of the Animal Man. 67 


men are connected with the new exten- 
sion of science which has given fresh 
interest and meaning to the whole his- 
tory of the race.”’ 

And now let us proceed to the sub- 


ject proper by considering the 


EVOLUTION OF THE ANIMAL MAN. 


The embryo of the future man begins 
life, like the primitive savage, in a one- 
roomed hut, a single simple cell. This 
cell is round and almost microscopic in 
size. When fully formed it measures 
only one-tenth of a line in diameter, 
and with the naked eye can be barely 


discerned as a very fine point. An 


$8 The Evolution of Man. 


outer. covering, transparent as glass, 
surrounds this little sphere, and in the 
interior, embedded in protoplasm, lies 
a bright globular spot. In form, in 
size, in composition there is no appar- 
ent difference between this human cell 
and that of any other mammal. The 
dog, the elephant, the lion, the ape. 
and a thousand others begin their 
widely different lives in a house the 
same as man’s. At an earlier stage, 
indeed, before it has taken on its pel- 
lucid covering, this cell has affinities 
still more astonishing ; for at that re- 
moter period, the earlier forms of all 


living things, both plant and animal, 


Evolution of the Animal Ahan. 69 


are one. It is one of the most astound- 
ing facts developed by modern science 
that the first embryonic abodes of moss 
and fern and pine, of shark and crab 
and coral polyp, of lizard, leopard, 
monkey and man are so exactly similar 
that the highest powers of mind and 
microscope fail to trace the smallest 
distinction between them. 

‘‘Hven under the highest magnifying 
power of the best microscope,’’ says 
Haeckel, ‘*there appears to be no essen- 
tial difference between the eggs of man, 
of the ape, of the dog, etc. This does 
not mean that they are not really differ- 


ent in these different mammals. On 


70 The Evolution of San, 


the contrary, we must assume that such 
differences, at least in point of chemical 
constitution, exist universally. In ac- 
cordance with the law of individual va- 
riation, we must assume that all indi- 
vidual organisms are, from the very 
beginning of their individual existence, 
different though often very similar. 
But with our rough and incomplete 
apparatus we are not in a position 
actually to perceive these delicate indi- 
vidual differences which must often be 
sought only in the molecular struc- 
fure.?/ 

But let us watch the development of 


this one—called human embryo. | In- 


Evolution of the Animal Man. ral 


crease of rooms in architecture can be 
effected in either of two ways—by 
building entirely new rooms, or by 
partitioning old ones. Both of these 
methods are employed in Nature. The 
first, gemmation, or budding, is common 
among the lower forms of life. The 
second, differentiation by partition, or 
segmentation, is the approved method 
among higher animals and is that 
adopted in the case of man. It pro- 
ceeds, after the fertilized ovum has 
completed the complex preliminaries 
of karyokinesis, by the division of the 
interior-contents into two equal parts, 


so that the original cell is now occupied 


re The Evolution of Adan. 


by two nucleated cells with the old 
cell-wall surrounding them outside. 
The two-roomed house is, in the next 
development, and by a similar process 
of segmentation, developed into a struc- 
ture of four rooms, and this into one of 
eight, and so on. 

When the multicellular globe, made 
up of countless offshoots or divisions of 
the original pair, has reached a certain 
size, its centre becomes filled with a 
tiny lakelet of watery fluid. ‘This fluid 
gradually increases in quantity, and 
. pushing the cells outward, packs them 
into a single layer, circumscribing it on 


every side with an elastic wall. At 


Evolution of the Animal Man. 73 


one part a dimple soon appears, which 
slowly deepens until a complete hollow 
is formed, the invagination of the 
sphere being carried so far that the 
cells at the bottom of the hollow touch 
those at the opposite side. The ovum 
has now become au open bag or cup—a 
cup such as one might make by doubling 
in an India-rubber ball—the »astrula 
of biology. 

The great evolutionary interest of 
this development lies in the fact that 
probably all animals above the Protozoa 
pass through this gastrula stage. That 
some of the lower Metazoa, indeed, 


never develop much beyond it may be 


74 The Evolution of ddan. 


shown by a glance at the structure of. 
the humbler Coelenterates—the sim- 
plest of all illustrations of the fact that 
embryonic forms of higher animals are 
usually permanently represented by the 
adult forms of lower. ‘The chief thing, 
however, to note here is the doubling- 
in of the ovum to gain a double instead 
of a single wall of cells. For these two 
different layers—the ectoderm and the 
endoderm, or the animal layer and the 
vegetal layer—play a unique part in the 
after-history ; all the organs of move- 
ment and sensation spring from the 
one, all the organs of nutrition and re- 


production develop from the other. 


Evolution of the Animal ASan. 75 


Soon the number of chambers is so 
great that count is lost, and the activity 
becomes so vigorous in every direction 
that one ceases to notice individual 
eells+.at,,all..>The; tenement,., ‘m.. fact, 
consists now of innumerable groups of 
cells congregated together, suites of 
apartments, as it were, which have 
quickly arranged themselves in sym- 
metrical, definite, and withal different 
forms. Were these forms not different 
as well as definite, we should hardly 
call it an evolution, nor should we 
characterize the resulting aggregation 
as a higher organism. A hundred cot- 


tages placed in a row would never form 


76 The Evolution of Man. 


a castle. What makes the castle supe- 
rior to the hundred cottages is not the 
number of its rooms, for they are possi- 
bly fewer; nor their differences in 
shape, for that is immaterial. It lies in 
the nature and number and variety of 
useful purposes to which the rooms are 
put, the perfection with which each is 
adapted to its end, and the harmonious 
co-operation among them with refer- 
ence to some common work. This also 
is the distinction between a _ higher 
animal and a humble creature like the 
centipede or the worm, which are but 
ageregations of similar segments. The 


fact that any growing embryo is passing 


Evolution of the Animal aan. vu 


through a real development is decided 
by the new complexity of structure, by 
the more perfect division of labor, and 
of better kinds of labor, and by the in- 
crease in range and efficiency of the 
correlated functions discharged by the 
whole. In the development of the hu- 
man embryo the differentiating and 
integrating forces are steadily acting 
and co-operating from the first, so that 
the result is not a mere aggregation of 
similar cells, but an organism with 
many different parts and many varied 


functions. 


78 Tbe Evolution of Aan. 


THE DISTANCE MAN HAS COME. 

But to the student of evolution it is 
not the beauty of this development that 
is the significant thing ;-nor is it the 
occultness of the process, nor the per- 
fection of the result, that fills him with 
awe as he surveys the finished work. 
It is the immense distance man has 
come. Between the early cell and the 
formed body, the ordinary observer sees 
the uneventful passage of perhaps some 
score of months. But the evolutionist 
sees concentrated into these few months 
the labor and the progress of inealcula- 


ble ages. Here before him is the entire 


The Distance Man bas Come. 79 


stretch of time since life first dawned 
upon the earth ; and as he watches the 
nascent organism climbing to its ma- 
turity he witnesses a spectacle which 
for strangeness and majesty stands alone 
in the field of biological research. 
What he sees before him is not the 
mere shaping or sculpturing of a man. 
The human form does not expand like 
a flower from its own flower-like bud. 
In all this, for a long time, there is 
nothing the least like aman. Whathe 
sees 1S a succession of animal forms, of 
strange inhuman creatures emerging 
from a crowd of still stranger and still 


more inhuman creatures—a vast proces- 


80 The Evolution of man. 


sion of lower forms of life. And it is 
only after a prolonged and unrecogniz- 
able series of metamorphoses that they 
culminate in some faint semblance of 
an image of one of the newest yet the 
oldest of created things. Hitherto we 
have been taught to look among the 
fossiliferous formations of geology for 
the buried lives of the earth’s past. 
But recent science has startled the 
world by declaring that the ancient life 
of the earth is not dead. It is risen. 
It exists to-day in the embryos of still- 
living things, and soine of the most 
archaic types find again a resurrection 


‘and a life in the frame of man himself. 


The Distance Man has Come. 81 


It is an amazing and an almost in- 
credible story. In the successive trans- 
formations of the human embryo there 
is a visible, actual, physical representa- 
tion of part of the life-history of the 
world. Human embryology is a con- 
densed zoology, a recapitulation and 
epitome of the main chapters in the 
natural history of the world. ‘The 
same processes of development which 
once took thousands of years for their 
consummiation are here condensed, fore- 
shortened, concentrated into the space 
of months. Nature husbands all its 
gains. A momentum won is never lost: 


Each platform reached by the humanem- 


82 The Evolution of Man. 


bryo in its upward course represents the 
embryo.of some lower animal which in 
some mysterious way has played a part 
in the pedigree of the human race, which 
haply has itself long since disappeared 
from off the earth, but is now and forever 
built into the inmost being of man. 
These lower animals, each at its succes- 
sive stage, have stopped short in their 
development ; man has gone on. At 
each fresh advance his embryo is found 
again abreast of some other animal form 
a little higher than that just passed. 
Continuing his ascent that also is over- 
taken, the now very complex embryo 


making up to one animal-embryo after 


The Distance Man bas Come. 83 


another until it has distanced all in its 
series, and stands alone. 

As the modern stem-winding watch 
contains the old clepsydra and all the 
most useful features in all the time- 
keepers that were ever made; as the 
Walter printing-press contains the rude 
hand-machine of Guttenburg, and all 
the best in all the machines that fol- 
lowed it; as the locomotive of to-day 
contains the engine of Watt, the loco- 
motives of Hedley and of Stephenson, 
and most of the improvements of suc- 
ceeding years, so man contains the em- 
bryonic bodies of earlier and humbler 


and clumsier forms of life. Yet in 


84 The Evolution of Adan. 


making the Walter press in a modern 
workshop the artificer does not begin 
by building again the press of Gutten- 
burg, nor in constructing the locomo- 
tive does the engineer first take a Watt’s 
machine, and then incorporate the Hed- 
ley, and then the Stephenson, and so 
on through all the improving types of, 
engines that have led up to this. 

But the astonishing thing is that in 
making a man, Nature does introduce 
the framework of these earlier types, 
displaying each crude pattern by itself 
before incorporating it in the finished 
work, 


The human embryo, to change the 


The Distance Man bas Come. 85 


figure, 1s a subtle phantasmagoria, a 
living theatre in which a weird trans- 
formation scene is being enacted, and 
in which countless strange and uncouth 
characters take part. Some of these 
characters are well known to science, 
some are strangers. As the embryo un- 
folds, one by one these animal actors 
come upon the stage, file past in phan- 
tom-like procession, throw off their 
drapery, and dissolve away into some- 
thing else. Yet as they vanish each 
leaves behind a vital portion of itself, 
some original and characteristic me- 
morial, something itself hath made or 


won, that perhaps it alone could make 


86 The Evolution of Man. 


or win—a bone, a muscle, a ganglion 
or a tooth—to be the inheritance of the 
race. And it is only after nearly all 
have played their part and dedicated 
their gift that a human form, mysteri- 
ously compounded of all that has gone 
before, begins to be discerned in their 
midst. 

The duration of this process, the pro- 
found antiquity of the last survivor, 
the tremendous height he has scaled, 
are inconceivable by the faculties of 
man. But measure the very lowest of 
the successive platforms passed in the 
ascent and see how very great a thing 


it is even to riseatall. The single cell, 


The Distance MMan bas Come. 87 


the first definite stage which the human 
embryo attains, is still the adult form 
of countless millions both of animals 
and plants. Just as in modern America 
the millionaire’s mansion—the evolved 
form—is surrounded by laborers’ cot- 
tages—the simple form—so in nature, 
living side by side with the many-celled 
higher animals, is an immense democ- 
tracy of unicellular artisans. These 
simple cells are perfect living things. 
The earth, the water and the air teem 
with them everywhere. They move, 
they eat, they reproduce their like. 
But one thing they do not do—they do 


not rise. These organisms have, as it 


88 The Evolution of Man. - 


were, stopped short in the ascent of 
life. And long as Evolution has worked 
upon the earth the vast numerical ma- 
jority of plants and animals are still at 
this low stage of being. So minute 
are some of these forms that if their 
one-roomed huts were arranged in a 
row it would take twelve thousand to 
form a street a single inch in length. 
In their watery cities—for most of them 
are lake-dwellers—a population of eight 
hundred thousand million could be ac- 
commodated within a cubic inch. Yet 
as there was a period in human history 
when none but cave-dwellers lived in 


Europe, so was there a time when the 


First Stages. 89 


highest forms of life upon the globe 
were these microscopic things. See 
therefore the meaning of Evolution 
from the want of it. In a single hour 
or second the human embryo attains the 
platform which represents the whole 
life-achievement of myriads of genera- 
tions of living things, and the next day 
or hour is immeasurable centuries be- 


yond them. 


FIRST STAGES. 


Through all what zodlogical regions 
the embryo passes in its great ascent 


from the one-celled forms, one can 


90 The Evolution of Ahan. 


never completely tell. Two cells, four 
cells, eight cells, a hundred cells, they 
succeed one another with such rapidity 
that it is impossible at each separate 
stage to catch the actual likeness to the 
embryo of other animals. Sometimes 
‘a familiar feature suddenly recalls a 
form well known to. science, but the 
likeness fades, and the developing em- 
bryo seems to wander among the ghosts 
of departed types. Long ago these 
crude, ancestral forms were again the 
highest animals upon the earth. For 
afew thousand years they reigned su- 
preme, furthered the universal evolu- 


tion by a hairsbreadth, and passed away. 


S$ntermediate Stages. 91 


The material dust of their bodies is laid 
long since in the Palzeozoic rocks, but 
their life and labor are not forgotten. 
For their gains were handed on toa suc- 
ceeding race, from that transmitted 
through an endless series of descend- 
ants till, sifted, enriched, accentuated, 
and still dimly recognizable, they re- 


appear in the physical frame of Man. 


INTERMEDIATE STAGES. 


After the early stages of human 
development are passed, the transfor- 
mations become more definite, and the 


features of the contributory animals . 


92 The Evolution of Man. 


more recognizable. Here, for example, 
is a stage at which the embryo in its 
anatomical characteristics resembles 
that of the Vermes or Worms. As yet 
there is no head, nor neck, nor back- 
bone, nor waist, nor limbs. A roughly 
cylindrical headless trunk—that is all 
that stands for the future man. One 
by one the higher Invertebrates are left 
behind, and then occurs the most 
remarkable change in the whole life- 
history. ‘This is the laying down of 
the line to be occupied by the spinal 
chord, the presence of which hence- 
forth will determine the place of Man 
in the Vertebrate sub-kingdom. At 


Intermediate Stages. 93 


this crisis, the eye which sweeps the 
field of lower Nature for an analogue 
will readily find it. It is a circum- 
stance of extraordinary interest that 
there should be living upon the globe 
at this moment an animal representing 
the actual transition from Invertebrate 
to Vertebrate life. The acquisition of 
a vertebral column is one of the great 
marks of height which Nature has be- 
stowed upon her creatures ; and in the 
shallow waters of the Mediterranean 
she has preserved for us a creature 
which, whether a degenerate form or 
not, can only be likened to one of her 


first rude experiments in this direction. 


94 The Evolution of Aan. 


This animal is the Lancelet, or Am- 
phioxus, and so rudimentary is the 
backbone that it does not contain any 
bone at all, but only a shadow or proph- 
ecy of it in cartilage. The cartilag- 
inous notochord of the Amphioxus 
nevertheless is the progenitor of all 
vertebral columns, and in the first in- 


stance this structure appears in the 
human embryo exactly as it now exists 


in the Lancelet. But this is only a 
singleexample. In living Nature there 
are a hundred other animal character- 
istics which at one stage or another 


the biologist may discern in the ever- 


The Climax. 95 


changing kaleidoscope of the human 


embryo. 


THE CLIMAX. 


We are not nearly half-way up the 
ascent yet, but the outline of the 
marvellous process will be seen. Up to 
this point man is but a first rough draft, 
an almost formless lump of clay. As 
yet there is no distinct head, no brain, 
no jaws, no limbs; the heart is imper- 
fect, the higher visceral organs are 
feebly developed, everything is element- 
ary. But gradually new organs loom 


in sight, old ones increase in complexity. 


96 The Evolution of Aan, 


By a magic which has never yet been 
fathomed the hidden Potter shapes and 
re-shapes the clay. The whole grows 
in size and symmetry. Resemblances, 
this time to the embryos of the lower 
vertebrate series, flash out as each new 
step is attained ; first the semblance of 
the Fish, then of the Amphibian, then 
of the Reptile, last of the Mammal. 
Of these great groups the leading em- 
bryonic characters appear as in a moving 
panorama, some of them pronounced 
and unmistakable, others mere sketches, 
suggestions, likeness of infinite subtlety. 
At clast the true Mammalian form 


emerges from the crowd. Far ahead of 


“AL But’? Proved. 97 


all at this stage stand out three species— 
the Tailed Catarrhine Ape, the Tailless 
Catarrhine, and last, differing physi- 
cally from these mainly by an enlarge- 
ment of the brain and a development 


of the larynx—Man. 


“ALL BUT’? PROVED. 


Whatever views be held of the doc- 
trine of Evolution, whatever theories 
of its cause, these facts of Embryology 
are all but proved. One says ‘‘all but ”’ 
proved ; for in perfect fairness one must 
record two facts on which any one may 


build an objection if he feels they have 
7 


)3 The Evolution of Man. 


serious strength. The first is that the 
exact genealogy of the vertebrates is 
not yet traced in every minute detail. 
Embryology is one of the youngest of 
the sciences. Man at present has a 
choice of early relatives. ‘Though his 
genealogical line is generally clear, yet 
so far as actual and specific identification 
is concerned, he is still ‘‘in search of 
a father.’’ For another thing, part of 
this embryological argument is at pres- 
ent founded on analogy. Our ideas of 
“the probable history of the human 
ovum for the first few days are mainly 
taken from our knowledge of the 


development of other mammals and of 


“FL But’? Proved. 99 


birds and reptiles. It is a general 
scientific fact, however, that over the 
graves of these myriad aspirants the 
Animal Man hasrisen. It was formerly 
held that the entire animal creation had 
contributed something to the anatomy 
of Man; or that, as Serres expressed it, 
‘‘Huiman Organogenesis is a condensed 
Comparative Anatomy.’? But though 
Man has not such a monopoly of the 
past as is here inferred—other types 
having here and there diverged and 
developed along lines of their own—it 
is certain that the materials for his body 


have been brought together from an 


109 The Evolution of Man. 


unknown multitude of lowlier forms of 
life. 


THE ‘TEMPLE OF THE BODY. 


Those who know the Cathedral of 
St. Mark’s will remember how this 
noblest of the Stones of Venice owes 
its greatness to the patient hands of 
centuries and centuries of workers, how 
every quarter of the globe has been 
spoiled of its treasures to dignify this 
single shrine. But he who ponders 
over the more ancient temple of the 
human body will find imagination fail 


him as he tries to think from what 


Temple of the Body. 101 


remote and mingled sources, from what 
lands, seas, climates, atmospheres, its 
various parts have been called together, 
and by what innumerable contributory 
creatures, swimming, creeping, flying, 
climbing, each of its several members 
was wrought and perfected. , What 
ancient chisel first sculptured the 
rounded columns of the limbs? What 
dead hands built the cupola of the brain, 
and from what older ruins were the 
scattered pieces of its mosaic-work 
brought? Who fixed the windows in 
its upper walls? What forgotten looms 
wove its tapestries and draperies ? What 


winds and weathers wrought the 


102 The Evolution of Man. 


strength into its buttresses? What 
ocean-beds and forest glades worked up 
the colors? What Loveand Terror and 
Night called forth the Music? And 
what Life and Death and Pain and 
Struggle put all together in the noise- 
less workshop of the past and removed 
each worker silently when its task was 
done? Of how all these things came 
to be Biology is one long record. The 
architects and builders of this mighty 
temple are not anonymous. ‘Their 
names and the work they did are graven 
forever on the walls and arches of the 
Human Embryo. For this is a volume 


of that Book in which Man’s members 


Degradation or Lxaltation. 103 


were written, which in continuance 
were fashioned, when as yet there was 


none of them. 


DEGRADATION OR EXALTATION. 


The descent of man from the animal 
kingdom is sometimes spoken of as a 
degradation. It is an unspeakable ex- 
altation. Recall the vast antiquity of 
that primal cell from which the human 
embryo first sets forth. Compass the 
nature of the potentialities stored up in 
its plastic substance. Watch all the 
busy processes, the multiplying energies, 


the mystifying transitions, the inexpli- 


104 The Evolution of Ahan. 


cable chemistry of this living laboratory. 
. Observe the variety and intricacy of its 
metamorphoses, the exquisite eradation 
of its ascent, the unerring aim with 
which the one type unfolds—never paus- 
ing, never uncertain of its direction, 
refusing arrest at intermediate forms, 
passing on to its flawless maturity with- 
out waste or effort or fatigue. See at 
every turn the sense of motion, of pur- 
pose and of aspiration. Discover how, 
with identity of process, and loyalty to 
the type, a hairsbreadth of deviation is 
yet secured to each, so that no two forms 
come out the same, but each arises an 


original creation, with features, charac- 


Degradation or Erxaltation. 105 


teristics, and individualities of its own. 
Remember finally, that even to make 
the first cell possible, stellar space had 
to be swept of matter, suns had to be 
broken up, planets had to cool, the 
agents of geology had to labor for mil- 
lenniums at the unfinished earth, and 
without mould or mortar fashion the 
pedestal to hold these breathing images 
of the Worker who made them all. 
Consider all this, and judge if Creation 
could have a sublimer meaning, or the 
human race possess a more splendid 


genesis. 





Che Hrrest of the Hnimal Boop 
of Man. 


| ie 
eth oes. 4a Deh T SK 
4 Me oe 

au iatd fo sei ine ae Ge Hla 


i \d 


at ato pve: 





Che #rrest of the Hnimal Bodp 
of aan. 


Not less remarkable than that groups 
of plants and animal forms have ad- 
vanced by gradual modifications during 
the geological ages is the fact that other 
whole groups have apparently stood still 
—stood still not in time, but in organ- 
ization. If nature is full of moving 
things, it is also full of fixtures. Thirty- 


one years ago, Mr. Huxley devoted the 
(109) 


110 The Evolution of Aan. 


anniversary address of the Geological 
Society to a consideration of what he 
called ‘‘ Persistent Types of Life,’’ and 
threw down to Evolutionists a puzzle 
which has never yet been fully solved. 
Ages ago the morphological possibilities 
along certain lines of bodily structure 
seem to have exhausted themselves. 
While some forms attained their climac- 
teric tens of thousands of years ago and 
perished, others persevered, and, with- 
out changing in any material respect, 
are alive to this day. 

Among the earliest carboniferous 
plants, for instance, there are found 


certain forms generically identical with 


Arrest of the Animal Body of Man, 111 


those now living. The cone of the 
existing Araucaria is scarcely to be dis- 
tinguished from that of an oolite form. 
The Tabulate Corals of the Silurian 
period are similar to those which exist 
to-day. ‘The Lamp-shells of our present 
seas so abounded at the same ancient 
date as to give their name to one of the 
great groups of "Silurian rocks—the 
Lingula Flags.  Star-fishes and Sea- 
urchins, almost the same as those which 
tenant the coast-lines of our present 
seas, crawled along what are now among 
the most ancient fossiliferous rocks. 
Both of the forms just named, the 


Brachiopods and the Echinoderms, have 


112 The Evolution of Man. 


come down to us almost unchanged 
through the nameless gap of time which 
separates the Silurian and Old Red 
Sandstone periods from the present era. 

This constancy of structure reveals a 
conservatism in Nature as unexpected 
as it is widespread. Does it mean that 
the architecture of living things has a 
limit beyond which development can- 
not go? In Gothic or Norman architect- 
ure there are terminal points which, 
once reached, can be but little improved 
upon. Without limiting working effi- 
ciency, they can go no further. These 
styles in the very nature of things seem 


to have limits. 


Arrest of the Animal Body of Man. 113 


Mr. Ruskin has indeed told us that there 
are only three possible forms of good 
architecture in the world: Greek, the 
architecture of the Lintel ; Romanesque, 
the architecture of the Rounded Arch ; 
Gothic, the architecture of the Gable. 
All the architects in the world, he © 
assures us, will never discover any other 
way of bridging a space than these 
three ; they may vary the curve of the 
arch, or curve the sides of the gable, or 
break them down ; but in doing this they 
are merely modifying or subdividing, 
not adding to the generic form. In the 
same way there may be terminal generic 


forms in the architecture of animals; 
§ : 


114 The Evolution of Man. 


and the persistent types just named may 
represent in their several directions the 
natural limits. of possible modification. 
No further modification of a radical 
kind, that is to say, could in these in- 
stances be introduced without detriment 
to practical efficiency. ‘These terminal 
forms thus mark a normal maturity ; 
they represent the ends of the twigs of 
the tree of life. 


TERMINAL POINTS. 2 


Now consider the significance of that 
fact. Nature is not. an interminable 


succession. It is not always a becom- 


Terminal Points. 115 


ing. Sometimes things arrive. The 
Lamp-shells have arrived: they are a 
part of the permanent furniture of the 
world ; along that particular line there 
will probably never be anything higher. 
The Star-fishes also have arrived ; and 
the Sea-urchins ; and the Nautilus, and 
the Bony Fishes, and the Tapir, and 
possibly the Horses—all these are highly 
divergent forms which have run out the 
length of their tether and can go no 
further. When the plan of the world 
was made, to speak teleologically, these 
types of life were assigned their place 
and limit, and there they have remained. 


If it were wanted to convey the impres- 


116 The Evolution of dan. 


sion that Nature had some large end in 
view, that she was not drifting aimlessly 
towards a general higher level, it could 
not have been done more impressively 
than by everywhere placing on the field 
of Science these fixed points, these in- 
numerable consummations, these clean- 
cut mountain peaks, which for millen- 
niums have never ascended higher. 
Even as there is a plan in the parts, 


there is a plan in the whole. 


THE BODY OF MAN. 


Now the most certain of all these 


‘terminal points’? in the evolution of 


The Body of Man. ui b 


Creation is the body of Man. Anatomy 
places Man at the head of all other ani- 
mals that were ever made; but what is 
infinitely more instructive, with him 
the series comes to an end. Man is not 
only the highest branch, but the highest 
possible branch. The physical tree of 
life has here run out. Take the only 
valid testimony on this point, that of 
anatomy itself, and see not only the fact 
aintmed, but .the rationale. of it... In 
the words of Clelland: 

‘“The development of the brain is in 
connection with a whole system of de- 
velopment of the head and face which 


cannot be carried further than in Man. 


118 The Evolution of Man. 


For the mode in which the cranial cav- 
ity is gradually increased in size is a 
regular one, which may be explained 
thus: we may look on the skull as an 
irregular cylinder, and at the same time 
that it is expanded by increase of height 
and width, it also undergoes a curva- 
ture or bending on itself, so that the 
base is crumpled together while the 
roof is elongated. This curving has 
gone on in man till the fore end of the 
cylinder, the part on which the brain 
rests above the nose, is nearly parallel 
to the aperture of communication of 
the skull with the spinal canal, z. e., 


the cranium has a curve of 180 ora few 


The BWodyp of Man. 119 


degrees more or less. This curving of 
the base of the skull involves change 
in position of the face bones also, and 
could not go on to a further extent 
without cutting off the nasal. cavity 
from the throat. ... Thus you see 
there is anatomical evidence that the 
development of the vertebrate form has 
reached its limit by completion in 
man.’?* This author’s conception of 
the whole field of living nature is so 
suggestive.that we may continue the 
quotation: ‘‘To me the animal king- 


dom appears not an indefinite growth 





*ProhUR Clelland, MAIDsULY. Disk. RiS., 


Journal of Anatomy, vol. xviii., p. 361. 


120 Tbe Evolution of Man. 


like a tree, but a temple with many 
minarets, none of them capable of being 
prolonged, while the central dome is 
coinpleted by the structure of man. 
The development of the animal king- 
dom is the development of intelligence 
chained to matter; the animals in 
which the nervous system has reached 
the greatest perfection are the verte- 
brates, and in Man that part of the 
nervous system which is the organ of 
intelligence reaches, as I have sought to 
show, the highest development possible 
to a vertebrate animal, while intelli- 
gence itself has grown to reflection and 


volition. On these grounds, I believe, 


Arrest of the Animal. 121 


not that man is the highest possible in- 
telligence, but that the human body is 
the highest form of human life pos- 
sible, subject to the conditions of mat- 
ter on the surface of the globe, and 
that the structure completes the design 


of the animal kingdom.’’ 


THE ARREST OF THE ANIMAL. 


Even before these facts about the 
brain were known Mr. Fiske had 
reached the same conclusion on general 
grounds. On the earth, he assures us, 
there will never be a higher creature 


than Man. Itisa daring prophecy, but 


122 The Evolution of Adan. 


every probability of science substan- 
tiates it. With the body of Man the 
final fruit of the tree of Organic Evolu- 
tion has appeared. In Man, about this 
time in history, we are confronted with 
a stupendous crisis in Nature—the ar- 
rest of the animal. This was illus- 
trated by the case of the hand. The 
first hand was the Amoeba hand, and 
from that upwards there was a long ar- 
ray of more and more accurate instru- 
ments of prehension until the Chim- 
panzee hand was reached. Even for 
the use of her highest product Nature 
has not been able to make anything 


much more perfect than the hand of 


Arrest of the Animal. 123 


this anthropoid ape. It is probable 
that Nature could take out no new 
patent in this direction. ‘The causes up 
to this point which furthered the evolu-_ 
tion of the hand had begun to cease to 
act. There came atime when the ne- 
cessities became too numerous and too 
varied for anatomical adaptations to 
keep pace with them. Then came a 
fatal day for the hand when the discov- 
ery of tools was made. Henceforth 
what the hand used. to do, and was 
slowly becoming adapted to do better, 
was to be done by external appli- 
ances. ‘Tools are external hands. Le- 


vers are the extensions of the bones of 


124 The Evolution of Aan. 


the arm. Hammers are callous substi. 
tutes for the fists. Knives do the work 
of nails. The day that the cave-man 
first split the bone of a bear by thrust- 
ing a stick in it and striking it home 
with a stone, the doom of the hand was 
sealed. ‘Take up the functions of the 
animal body one by one, and it will be 
seen how the same arresting hand is 
laid upon them all. ) 

The same causes that lead to the ar- 
rest of the hand are working to stop 
the development of the eye. Spec- 
tacles, telescopes, microscopes—external 
eyes—have superseded the work of Or- 


ganic Evolution. Science has not only 


Arrest of the Animal. 125 


invented these better eyes, but has gone 
the length of making a better eye to 
look through them—the photographic 
eye. In at least five important particu- 
lars this new eye is superior to the eyes 
of Organic Evolution. It can see where 
the human eye with the best aid of 
optical instruments sees nothing at all. 
It can distinguish certain objects with 
far greater clearness and definition. 
Owing to the rapidity of its action it 
can detect changes which are too sud- 
den for the human eye to follow. It 
can look steadily for hours without 


growing tired, and it can record what 


126 The Evolution of Man. 


it sees with infallible accuracy upon a 
plate which time will not efface. 

So far as hearing is concerned, the 
cause which has mainly furthered its 
evolution up to this point—fear of sur- 
prise by enemies——has ceased to operate, 
and the muscles for the erection of the 
ears have fallen into disuse ; while the 
ear itself, in contrast with that of the 
savage, is slow and dull. The skin, 
from the continuous use of clothes, has 
forfeited its protective power. Owing 
to the use of cooked viands the muscles 
of the jaw are losing strength. The 
teeth are undergoing marked degenera. 


tion. In an age of vehicles the lower 


Arrest of the Animal. 127 


limbs find their occupation almost gone, 
especially in America. For mere mus- 
cle, man has almost now no use. Nim- 
bleness and strength, once a necessity, 
are either a luxury or a pastime. Once 
all men were athletes ; now you have to 
pay to see them. ‘To some extent at 
least some phonograph may yet speak 
for us, some telephone hear for us, some 
typewriter write for us, chemistry di- 
gest for us, and incubation nurture us. 
So everywhere the animal in Man is in 
danger of losing ground. He has ex- 
panded until the world is his body. 
The former body, the one hundred 


aud fifty pounds or so of organized tis- 


128 The Evolution of Man. 


sue he carries about with him, 1s little 
more than a mark of identity. His 
body no longer generates but only 
utilizes energy. It is but a link with 
the wider framework of the arts; a 
belt between machinery and machin- 
ery, a turncock of the physical forces. 
Never was the body of Man greater 
than with this sentence of suspen- - 
sion passed upon us. This marked an 
era in the world’s history; the cycle 
of matter was now complete. Evolu- 
tion had culminated in a creation so ex- 
alted and complex as to form the founda- 
tion of a new and inconceivably loftier 


order of being. Nature is full of 


Arrest of the Animal. 129 


new departures, but since time began 
there never was anything approaching 
in importance that period when the 
animal brain broke into activity and 
the creature first felt it had a mind. 
Henceforth intelligence triumphed over 
physiological adaptation ; the wise were 
naturally selected before the strong. 
The favors of evolution were now lav- 
ished upon the brain, and Man entered 
into final possession of a monopoly 
which can never be disturbed. The 
ethical implications of all this were sig- 


nificant and overwhelming. 
2 


Ad De 
- \ 3 
ae Bb ah 


ot 
ni > ies 
2 


TH, ST It HOSE 





The Residuum of the Hnimal 
in Man. 


re: “tHe a é 


men MED 


ae 


ote yous ot sous $0 Hie a : Aa 


net | 
hee uP 


| eT oe Ree Oe ee VA 
Gist nis Ween s eth 


eae to. al ‘Big 
a 


ul 


‘earid te, be 


bi ee 
cee be 


. 





The Residuum of the Animal 
in Man. 


WHEN man emerges from his long 
sojourn in the Animal Kingdom he 
returns laden with relics to show where 
he has been. ‘These things were once 
part of his ancestor’s life and lot; they 
represent organs which have been out- 
grown; old forms of apparatus long 
since exchanged for better, yet somehow 
not yet destroyed by the hand of time. 


The physical body of Man, so great is 
(133) 


134 The Evolution of ddan. 


the number of these relics, is an old 
curiosity-shop, a museum of obsolete 
anatomies, discarded tools, outgrown 
and aborted organs. All other animals 
also contain among their useful organs 
a proportion which are long past their 
work ; and so significant are these rudi- 
ments of a former state of things that 
anatomists have often expressed their 
willingness to stake the theory of 


Descent upon their presence alone. 


TRACES OF THE SEA. 


Prominent among these vestigial 


structures, as they are called, are those 


Traces of the Sea. 135 


which smack of the sea. At one time 
there was nothing else in the world but 
sea-water life ; all the land animals are 
late Evolutions. One reason why ani- 
mals began in the water is that it is 
easier to live in the water—anatomi- 
cally and physiologically cheaper—than 
toliveon the land. The denser element 
supports the body better, demanding a 
less supply of muscle and bone ; and 
the perpetual motion of the sea brings 
the food to the animal, instead of 
making it necessary for the animal to 
move to the food. ‘This and other cor- 
related circumstances call for far less 


mechanisin in the body, and, asa matter 


- 1386 The Evolution of Man, 


of fact, all the simplest forms of living 
at the present time are inhabitants of 
the water. 

The chief characteristic of a fish is, 
of course, its apparatus for breathing the 
air dissolved in the water. ‘This con- 
sists of gills supported on strong arches, 
the branchial arches, which in the Elas- 
mobranch fishes are from five to seven 
in number, and are not covered by any 
operculum or lid. Communicating with 
these arches, in order to allow the water 
which has been taken in at the mouth 
to pass out at the gills, an equal num- 
ber of slits or openings are provided in 
the neck. Without these holes in their 


Traces of the Sea, 137 


neck all fishes would instantly perish, 
aud we may be sure Nature took excep- 
tional care in perfecting this particular 
piece of mechanism. Now, it is one 
of the most extraordinary facts in 
natural history that these slits in the 
fish’s neck are still represented in the 
neck of Man. Almost the most prom- 
inent feature, indeed, after the head, 
in every mammalian embryo, are the 
four clefts or furrows of the old oill- 
slits. They are still known in embry- 
ology by no other name—gill-slits—and 
so persistent are these characters that 
children have been known to be born 


with them not only externally visible— 


138 The Evolution of Aan. 


which is a common occurrence—but 
open through and through, so that fluids 
taken in at the mouth could pass through 
them and trickle out at the neck. 
Almost more remarkable is a second 
association of these vestigial structures 
with what are known as cervical ears. 
Nature seldom parts with any struct- 
ure she has ever taken the trouble to 
make. She changes it into something 
else. She rarely also makes anything 
new. Her method of creation is to 
adapt something old. Grant that the 
marine animals passed into land ani- 
mals, and that then the water-breathing 


apparatus proved useless, what became 


Traces of the Seca. 139 


of it? One of the first things needed 
by the animal is an improved apparatus 
for hearing. In fishes sound enters 
through the walls of the head to an in- 
ternal™ear. ‘The land animal needs an 
external ear. Theexternal and middle 
ear in man have been made out of the 
first gill-slit and its surrounding parts. 
Ears are sometimes found in human 
beings bursting out half-way down the 
neck, at the place which gill-slits would 
occupy if they still persisted. These 
vestiges appear occasionally, not only 
in human beings, but also in the lower 


animals. 


140 The Evolution of Man. 


SURVIVALS OF THE APE. 


Then there is the survival of the tip 
of the ancestral ear which was noticed 
by Mr. Darwin; the survival 8 the 
power to move the ears and the skin of 
the forehead and scalp—a power once 
useful for shaking flies off the skin ; the 
nictitating membrane of the eye, for 
sweeping that member clean; the 
human tail, which appears in the human 
embryo, where may also be seen the 
muscles for wagging it ; the rudimentary 
hair on the arm connected in its direc- 
tion with the arboreal habits of the 


anthropoid apes. 


—Survivals of the Ape. 141 


Coming under the same category is 
perhaps the most striking of all the 
vestigial organs of man—that of the 
Vermiform Appendage of the Czcum. 
Heres a structure which is not only 
of no use to man now, but is a veritable 
death trap. In herbivorous animals this 
‘‘ blind tube’’ is very large—longer in 
some cases than the body itself—and 
of great use in digestion, but in man it 
is shrunken into the merest rudiment, 
while in the orang-outang it is only a lit- 
tle larger. Inthe human subject, owing 
to its diminutive size, it can be of no 
use whatever, while it forms an easy 


receptacle for the lodgment of foreign 


142 The Evolution of Man, 


bodies such as fruit-stones, which set 
up inflammation and in various ways 
cause death. In man this tube is the 
same in structure as the rest of the in- 
testine ; it is ‘‘ covered with peritoneum, 
possesses a muscular coat, and is lined 
with mucous membrane. In the early 
embryo it is equal in calibre to the rest 
of the bowel, but at a certain date it 
ceases to grow pari passu with it, and 
at the time of birth appears asa thin 
tubular appendix to the cecum. In 
the newly-born child it is often abso- 
lutely as long as the full-grown man.”’ 


This precocity is always an indication 


Survivals of the Ape. 143 


that the part was of great importance 
to the ancestors of the human species. 
So important is the key of Evolution 
to the modern pathologist that in cases 
of malformation his first resort is always 
. to seek an explanation in lower forims 
of life. It is found that conditions 
which are pathological in one animal 
are natural in others of a lower species. 
Take for instance a common case of 
malformation—club-foot. All children 
before birth display the most ordinary 
form of this deformity—that, namely, 
where the sole is turned inwards and 
upwards and the foot is raised—and it 


is only gradually that the foot attains 


144 The Evolution of Man, 


the normal adult position. The abnor- 
mal position, abnormal that is in adult 
man, is the normal condition of things 
in the case of the gorilla. Club-foot, 
hence, is simply gorilla-foot—a case of 
the arrested development of a character 
which apparently came along the line 
of the direct Simian stock. 

Take away the theory that Man has 
evolved from a lower animal condition, 
and there is no explanation whatever 
of any one of these phenomena. With 
such facts before us, it is mocking 
human intelligence to assure us that 
Man has not some connection with the 


rest of the animal creation, or that the 


The Missing Wink. 145 


processes of his development stand un- 
related to the other ways of Nature. 
That Providence, in making a new 
being, should deliberately have inserted 
these eccentricities, without their hav- 
ing any real connection with the things 
they so well imitate, or any organic 
relation with the rest of his body, is, at 
least with our present knowledge, simple 


irreverence. 


THE MISSING LINK. 


It is not to be supposed, nevertheless, 
that Man is descended from any exist- 


ingape. The anthropoid apes branched 
10 


146 The Evolution of Aan, 


off laterally at a remote period from 
the nearest human progenitors. ‘The 
challenge to produce links between man 
and the living man-like apes is difficult 
to take seriously. Should any one so 
violate the first principles of Evolution 
as to make it, it is only to be said that 
it cannot be met. An anthropoid ape 
could as little develop into a man as 
coulda man pass backwards into an an- 
thropoid ape. That does not, however, 
affect the fact of the kinship that exists 
between them—a kinship so marked 
that the anthropoids are more like Man 
in several prominent anatomical charac- 


ters than they are to the next, or flat- 


The Missing Link. 147 


nosed, monkeys. The distance, indeed, 
between the lower and the higher apes 
is greater than between the higher apes 
and man. 

The challenge, however, to produce, 
not missing links between man and ape, 
but between man and cruder man-like 
forms, isafairone. Eighteen years ago 
Dana entnciated this challenge in em- 
phatic terms: ‘‘No remains of fossil 
man bear evidence to less perfect erect- 
ness of structure than in civilized man, 
or to any nearer approach to the man 
ape in essential characteristics—this is 
the more extraordinary in view of the 


fact that from the lowest limits in exist- 


148 The Evolution of Man. 


ing man, there are all possible stadhe 
up to the highest; while below that 
level there is an abrupt fall to the ape 
level, in which the cubic capacity of the 
brain is one-half less. If the links ever 
existed then without trace is so ex- 
tremely improbable that it may be pro- 
nounced impossible. Until some are 
found, science cannot assert that they 
ever existed.” 

Since these words were written no 
conquest either in the field of palzeon- 
tology or anthropology has revealed any 
trace of the existence of anthropithecus, 
or homo alalus, or the hypothetical ape- 


like man who led up to Man. Even 


The Missing Link. 149 
Mr. Huxley admits that ‘‘the fossil re- 


mains of man hitherto discovered do 
not seem to take us appreciably nearer 
to that lower pithecoid form, by the 
modification of which he has probably 
become what he is, and that it is an 
unsolved problem why no traces of the 
lower line of man’s ancestors, back to 
the remote period when he first branched 
off from the pithecoid type, have been 
discovered.’’ Should any one, therefore, 
incline to set off this negative proof 
against all the positive proof of embry- 
ology and anatomy, so far as facts are 


concerned, he is at full liberty to do so. 


150 The Evolution of Aan. 


But in assuming such a position, one or 
two facts must be held in view. 

In the first place one must cite, as 
always when such objections are urged, 
the imperfection of the geological 
record. Until the earth’s crust, and 
even some parts of the sea bottom, have 
‘yielded up all the fossils they contain, 
this objection can only be provisional. 
In the second place the later discoveries 
of paleontology have met the demand 
for missing links in several most striking 
and unexpected cases. For some time 
after the call for an actual sign was 
made—the call to science to produce the 


actual stages in the transmission of any 


The Missing Link. 151 


given species—there was no response. 


Paleontology seemed baffled. Then 
came the magnificent demonstration 


from Yale of the Evolution of the Horse, 
and from Steinheim of the transmuta- 
tion of Planorbis—cases where the miss- 
ing links have come in one after another, 
and in series so perfect that the evidence 
for the evolution of these forms is 
irresistible. ‘‘On the evidence of pa- 
leeontology,’’ says the ‘* Encyclopedia 
Britannica,’’ ‘‘the Evolution of many 
existing forms of animal life from their 
predecessors is no longer an hypothesis, 
but a historical fact.”? 


Should neither of these considerations 


152 The Evolution of Asan. 


weigh in the case of Man, there remains 
one other. It may be essential to the 
Darwinian theory of Evolution that 
minutely graded links should at one 
time have existed between all forms of 
animals, but it is not essential to the 
general theory of Evolution. It is the 
belief of many evolutionists that advance 
does not proceed by microscopic changes, 
but that Nature, on the contrary, some- 
times makes sudden leaps. As every 
one knows, this is Wallace’s view, but 
what is of more significance in the im- 
mediate connection is that it is the 
opinion of Mr. Huxley. ‘‘Mr. Darwin’s 


position,’’ he says, ‘‘ might, we think, 


Otber Evidence. 153 


have been even stronger than it is if he 
had not embarrassed himself with the 
aphorism, Natura non factt saltum. 
We believe, as we have said above, that 


Nature does make jumps.”’ 


OTHER EVIDENCE. 


Were it the present object to complete 
a proof of the descent of Man, one 
might go on to select from other depart- 
ments of science evidence equally large 
and not less striking. ‘Turn the side of 
paleontology, it might be shown that 
Man appears in the earth like any other 


fossil, and in the exact place where 


154 The Evolution of Man. 


science would expect to find him. 
When born, he is ushered into life like . 
any other animal, he is subject to the 
same diseases, he yields to the same 
treatment. When fully grown, there 
is almost nothing in his anatomy to 
distinguish him from his nearest allies 
among other animals. Almost bone for 
bone, nerve for nerve, muscle for 
muscle, he is the same. But the im- 
mediate purpose is not to accumulate a 
proof. It is to outline the story and 
extract its meaning. And these curious 
facts about vestigial organs are cited for 
a deeper purpose than to produce con- 


nection on a point which, after all, is 


The Problem of Evil. 155 


of importance only in its higher impli- 


cations. 


THE PROBLEM OF EVIL. 


The anatomist and pathologist are 
not the only people who discover traces 
of an animal pastin Man. ‘There is a 
further class of scientific experts, in as 
true a sense students of nature, whose 
work is the dissection of the soul. 
Within Man’s being they have detected 
vestiges, not greater but larger in num- 
bers, not less but more distinct, of an 
animal’s moods, proclivities, and pas- 


sions. ‘hese men have. not invented 


156 The Evolution of Man. 


these remains, these abnormalities, these 
malformations of the moral nature. 
They are as real as the gill-slits and the 
cervical ear, infinitely more real, be- 
cause their muscles are not yet atro- 
phied. 

To say that theology invented sin is 
as unintelligent a charge as to say that 
biology invented vestigial structures. 

It is an extraordinary circumstance 
that scientific men should so often be 
blind to these facts, should treat their 
fellow-evolutionists in the moral region 
with so much contempt, should regard 
them as if they were merely analyzing 


moonshine, and spending their lives in 


The Problem of Evil. 157 


fighting shadows. ‘Theology, let it be 
said once more, does not make the 
problem of evil ; it is its efforts to solve 
it that have led men to associate it with 
that science. And beside the life of a 
man who is striving to eradicate the 
animal in human nature, the career of 
the most brilliant investigator who con- 
fines himself to himself and to the 
natural plane is a waste and a denial of 
evolution. 

If Man inherits the gill-slits of a 
shark, is it unscientific to expect that he 
will also inherit the spirit of a shark? 
And when he plays the shark in busi- 


ness, is the phenomenon less worthy of 


£5685") Che Evolution of Man. 


investigation? If the first excite won- 
der, is it absurd that the last should ex- 
cite pity, or call forth some attempt to 
counteract it? If Man inherits the 
head of a tiger or a bear, shall not 
some blood of the tiger or the bear run 
in his veins? and if his temptation is 
to let these loose in his family life, are 
the means for helping him to check it 
a thing for laughter? Whatever other 
content the theologian may read into 
the word evil, this much at least it con- 
tains; this much the evolutionist on 
his own principles must admit; this 
much the scientific man is as much re- 


sponsible for acknowledging and at- 


The Problem of Evil. 159 


tempting to deal with as any other phe- 
nomenon in nature which he sees to be 
injurious to the life and welfare of his 
fellow-beings. 

It is not to be supposed that his ani- 
mal past has left nothing more in man 
than material relics. A father leaves 
his son his money, his home, his busi- 
ness, his material likeness, it may be, 
and physical constitution. But these 
are nothing. His chief legacy is his 
mind and soul. What mind and soul, 
what disposition and nature an animal 
has, that also it has partly left in Man. 
An attempt has been made by some 


evolutionists to throw light on the ques- 


160 The Evolution of Man. 


tion of sin—treating it as a “‘ vestigial 
structure’’ or residuum of the animal, 
with the difference that it still func- 
tioned more than anything else beside. 
This, valuable up to a point, was pre- 
carious except to distinctly theistic 
forms of evolution. 

The problem really is, not how sin 
came into the world, but how to get it 
out. If science would come to the 
rescue here, its contribution would be 
worth having. But if science can even 
in part diagnose the disease, that of it- 
self isa step toward removing it. If 
we knew how vestiges disappeared in 


the animal world, that knowledge might 


The Problem of Evil. 161 


‘accelerate the disappearance of evil. 
Some of the attempts to stop evil in the 
world are as unwise and as futile as 
were some of the attempts to eradicate 
cholera or cancer. Scientific precision 
is especially needed inthe departments 
of applied theology, sociology, and even 
political economy. Man’s present am- 
phibious life cannot be final. As Vic- 
tor Hugo said: ‘‘I am the tadpole of 


an archangel.”’ 
11 





The Struggle for Life. 


3 dh vk ‘9 aioe! 
aa J Jeuett ae 


As feng 





The Struggle for Life. 


THE first practical problem in the 
Ascent of Man was to get him started 
on his upward path. It was not enough 
for Nature to equip him with a body, to 
plant his foot on the lowest rung of the 
ladder. She must introduce into her 
economy some great principle which 
shall secure, not for him alone, but for 
every living thing, that they shall work 
upward toward the top. The inertia of 


things is such that without compulsion 
(165) 


166 The Evolution of Man. 


they will never move. And so admir- 
ably has this compulsion been applied 
that its forces are hidden in the very 
nature of life itself—the very act of 
living contains within it a law of 
progress. An animal cannot be with- 
out becoming. 

One of the great principles into the 
hands of which this mighty charge was 
given is the Struggle for Life. It is 
one of the chief keys for unlocking the 
mystery of Man's Ascent, and so im- 
portant in all development, that Mr. 
Darwin gives it the supreme rank 
among the factors in Evolution. 

Matthew Arnold describes a_ bird 


The Struggle for Life, 167 


“‘deep in its unknown day’s employ.’’ 
But, peace to the poet, there is no 
doubt as to its day’s employ. ‘The bird 
is struggling to get a living. It awoke 
at daybreak, and set out to catch the 
early worm. But another bird was 
awake before it, or perhaps the early 
worm, in its own struggle for life, had 
discreetly disappeared. With fifty other 
breakfastless birds it had to bide its 
time, to scour the country, to prospect 
the trees, the grass, the ground, to lie 
in ambush, to attack and be defeated, to 
hope and be forestalled. At every meal 
the same programme is gone through, 


and every day, except that as the sea- 


168 The Evolution of Man. 


sons change, it has to take wing and fly 
for hundreds and thousands of miles to 
find a new hunting-ground. This is 
how birds live, and this is how birds 
are made. ‘They are the children of 
Struggle. Beak and limb, claw and 
wing, shape, strength, color, down to 
the last detail, birds and all living 
things are the expressions of their mode 
of life. 

Unfortunately this principle has been 
greatly perverted. ‘The emphasis has 
been placed on Struggle instead of upon 
Life, and Nature held up to us as a vast 
murderous machine for the annihilation 


of the majority and the survival of the 


The Struggle for Life. 169 


few. But the struggle for life, in the 
first instance, is simply living ; at the 
best it is living under a normal maxi- 
mum of pressure; at the worst, at an 
abnormal maximum. ‘The universe has 
to be so ordered that that which Man 
would not have done alone he should 
be compelled to do. In other words, it 
was necessary to introduce into Nature, 
aud into Human Nature, some such 
principle as the Struggle for Life. The 
first law of evolution, in short, is the 
first law of motion. ‘* Everybody con- 
-tinues in a state of rest, or of uniform 
motion in a straight line, unless he is 


compelled by impressed forces to change 


170 The Evolution of Man. 


that state.’ Nature supplied mankind 
with the impressed forces, with some- 
thing which it was compelled to respond 
to. Without that, it would have con- 
tinued forever as it began. 

The difference between a moving 
_ thing, however, and a moving maz, 1s 
that while the first is in itself unchanged 
by being moved, the sensitive and 
mobile body of the last is distinctly 
affected by the process. Man’s body is 
a quivering mass of protoplasm, that 
mysterious vital clay of which all his 
parts are made. ‘This protoplasm is one 
of the most complex substances in 


Nature, and unstable almost to explo- 


The Struggle for Life. 171 


siveness. Its molecules are built up 
like houses made of cards, which will 
tumble down at a touch. Every mo- 
ment it is on the brink of changing into 
something else ; it trembles on the verge 
of a physiological collapse. Now the 
remarkable thing is that when proto- 
plasm collapses, when the card house 
tumbles down, it does not tumble down 
into ruins. It tumbles down into cells, 
and cell-walls, and tissues, and the 
formed parts of the body. Muscle, 
bone, nerve, all the solid structures of 
the body, are tumbled-down protoplasm}; 
have all once been protoplasm. The 


business of protoplasm is to tumble 


172 Tbe Evolution of Man, 


down into these; and, when these are 
made, to keep on repairing their waste, 
to enlarge them, and to add new things 
to them. : | 

Now the thing that pulls the trigger, 
the touch that sets all the cards tum- 
bling, comes from the world around us. 
A whiff of cold air, a pressure of some- 
thing hard, some strain or friction, these 
call for adaptive changes in the body. 
Such is the nature of the body in 
man. 4 

A baby, for instance, is born without 
any teeth. Read in the light of Em- 
bryology, this means that the ancient 


stock from which man came had soft 


The Struggle for Life. 173 


and toothless gums. But this entrance 
to the mouth in the early days was a 
much-used gateway. It bore the. brunt 
of°all the traffic ‘of the’ food, ‘allthe 
strains and pressures and friction due 
to the passing in of coarse herbs and 
hard nuts and tough flesh. The harder 
the food, the greater would be the strain, 
The effect of these pressures upon the 
delicate cells of the gums is to harden 
them, just as corns are produced by 
pressure or callosities on the hands of a 
mechanic. ‘The response in increased 
density of tissue is in proportion to the 
strain and shock applied, and by the 


steady accumulation of sinall gains, the 


174 The Evolution of Man. 


gums become more and more callous, 
and teeth—which are anatomically sim- 
ply developments from the skin—are 
eradually established. Bone again is 
associated with the stimulus of the 
strain of muscular contraction ; and the 
entire circulatory system is a response 
to the pressure of the moving current 
of the blood. 

What is true of man’s bodily organi- 
zation is true of his life and habit as a 
whole. In the discharge of the few and 
simple activities of the day’s routine, and 
under the stimulus of competition with 
others like himself, man passes on to 


even higher and higher improvements. 


The Struggle for Lite. 175 


I can only dwell hastily on the 
struggle for life in the primitive savage, 
on his first tentative efforts to adjust 
himself to the physical conditions that 
surround him, on his assumption of the 
erect position, on his invention of 
weapons. His next stimulus came from 
his becoming a member of a tribe— 
necessarily in those days a fighting 
tribe. In the tribal struggle for life 
many new elements of character, or the 
germs of such elements, were introduced 
into his nature. Before being aggregated 
into a tribe the savage was a purely 
selfish being. Afterwards he had to 


divide his interests. Selfishness slowly 


176 The Evolution of dan. 


gave place to altruism, In battle the 
individual is lost sight of. It is the 
tribe which lives. Each victory in- 
creases the sense of unity, creates a 
feeling of patriotism, demonstrates that 
conjoint action is a paying thing in the 
struggle for life. Emergencies called 
out acts of self-sacrifice. By-and-by to 
the primary motive of joint action there 
was added another. One of the earliest 
emotions in the savage is loveof esteem. 
Hence a premium upon any action 
specially serviceable to the tribe. Hence 
special serviceableness would tend to 
become a definite ambition. The tribe 


which was most united, most heroic, 


The Struggle for Wife. 177 


whose individuals were most disinter- 
ested, most ready to make brilliant sac- 
rifices, would in the long run conquer 
tribes manifesting these qualities less. 
In time, nations with the rudiments of 
many such high qualities—forced upon 
them at the bayonet’s point—would be 
organized. 

This process is still going on. War 
was simply the modern form of the 
struggle for life. As the higher quali- 
ties became more pronounced and their 
exercise gave more satisfaction, the 
struggle passed into more refined forms. 
One of these was the industrial struggle. 


Another was the moral struggle. The 
12 


178 The Evolution of Man, 


former of these must give place to the 
latter. ‘The animal struggle for life 
must passaway. And under the stimu- 
lus of ideals man will continually press 
upwards, and find his further evolution 
in forms of moral, social, and spiritual 
antagonism. That a price in pain has _ 
been paid for the evolution of the world 
is certain. But Nature might safely be 
left to look after her own ethic. It is 
a principle in the study of history to 
suspend judgment both as to the mean- 
ing and the value of a policy until the 
chain of sequences it set in motion 
should be worked out to their last fulfil- 
ment. When the full tale is told it will 


The Struggle for Life. 179 


be time to pass judgment on its moral 
value. Men forget when they denounce 
the struggle for life that itis to be judged 
not only on the ground of sentiment, 
but of reason. The object of the sur- 
vival of the fittest is to produce fitness. 
If this is going to be a good world, the 
elimination or the transformation of the 
bad is the one thing required. To 
make a fit world, the unfit at every stage 
must pass away. Andif any self-acting 
law can bring this about, even if its 
bearing in individual cases seemed un- 
just or harsh, its necessity for the world 
as a whole is vindicated. For nature in 


her wisdom has a twofold object. The 


180 The Evolution of Man. 


first and most important is the preserva- 
tion and perfection of the species. The 
second is the comfort of the individual 
during this evolution. At times she is 
even willing to retard progress for the 
sake of the individual comfort of a 
whole generation. But she will ruth- 
lessly sacrifice the individual who isina 
hopeless minority whenever his interests 


conflict with the interests of the race. 


The Evolution of Mind. 


Me 


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— mn hai 


7 ty 
yi ea 


moth, ee: oat ie Z 


v 


fa) 


Na) 
et : 
jou 
Ou s Neel 


(i 
batts 


ie 


a 


van ab: 2 | “a seat 


if nee His Mii 3 





The Evolution of ADind. 


THE Evolution of Mind is an open 
question. As to the nature of mental 
faculty, science is absolutely without 
light. The passage from molecular 
movement to states of consciousness is 
unthinkable ; and the origin of mind as 
great a mystery as the origin of life. 
Of that evidence there are mainly four 
sources—the mind of a child, the mind 
of the lower animals, anthropological 


collections, and the mental states of 
(183) 


184 The Evolution of Man. 


savages. With regard to the first, if 
the mind of the infant had been evolved, 
and that not from primeval man, but 
from some more ancient animal, it 
could not to more perfection have simu- 
lated the appearance of having so come, 
The mind of a child not only grows, 
but grows in a certain order; and the 
astonishing fact about that order is that 
it is the probable order of evolution of 
mental faculty as a whole. Where 
science gets that probable order will be 
referred to by-and-by. Meantime, note 
the fact that not only in the manner, 
but in the order of its development, the 


human mind simulates a production of 


The Evolution of Mind. 185 


evolution. The mind of a child, in 
short, is to be treated as an unfolding 
embryo; and just as the embryo of the 
body recapitulates the long life-history 
of all the bodies that led up to it, so 
this subtler embryo in running its 
course through the swift years of early 
infancy runs up the psychic scale 
through which, as evidence from an- 
other field will show, mind probably 
evolved. We have seen also that in 
the case of the body, each step of: 
progress in the embryo has its equiva- 
lent either in the bodies or in the em- 
bryos of lower forms of life. Now each 


phase of mental development in the 


186 The Evolution of Aan. 


child is also permanently represented by 
the brain of some species among the 
lower animals or by the mind of some 
existing savages. 

With reference to Mind in the lower 
animals, it is mainly to Mr. Romanes 
that we owe the working out of the 
evidence in this connection ; and even 
though his researches be taken as little 
more than a preliminary exploration, 
their general results are striking. Real- 
izing that the most scientific way to 
discover whether there are any affinities 
between Mind in Animals and Mind:in 
Man is to compare the one with the 


other, he began a laborious study of the 


The Evolution of Mind. 187 


animal world. That abundant traces 
of Mind were found in the lower ani- 
mals goes without saying. But the 
range of mental phenomena discovered 
there may certainly excite surprise. 
Thus to consider only one set of phe- 
nomena—that of the emotions—all the 
following products of emotional devel- 
opment are represented at one stage or 
another of animal life: Fear, Surprise, 
Affection, Pugnacity, Curiosity, Jeal- 
ousy, Anger, Play, Sympathy, Emu- 
lation, Pride, Resentment, Sense of the 
Beautiful, Grief, Hate, Cruelty, Benev- 


olence, Revenge, Rage, Shame, Re- 


188 The Evolution of fan. 


egret, Deceitfulness, Sense of the Ludi- 
crous. 

But this list is something more than 
a bare catalogue of what human emo- 
tions exist in the animal world. It is 
an arranged catalogue, a more or less 
definite psychological scale. These 
emotions did not only appear in animals 
but they appeared in this order. Now 
to find out order in evolution is of first 
importance. For order of events is 
history, and Evolution is history. 

This history of course has no dates. 
It uses for calendar the table of the suc- 
cession of life on the earth. In creat- 


ures very far down the scale of Jife— 


The Evolution of Mind, 189 


the Annelids—Mr. Romanes distin- 
guished what appeared to him to be one 
of the earliest emotions—Fear. Some- 
what higher up, among the Insects, he 
met with the Social Feelings, as well 
as Industry, Pugnacity, and Curiosity. 
Jealousy seems to have been born into 
the world with Fishes ; Sympathy with 
Birds, ‘The Carnivora are responsible 
for Cruelty, Hate, and Grief; the An- 
thropoid Apes for Remorse, Shame, the 
Sense of the Ludicrous and Deceit. 
Now when we compare this table 
with a similar table compiled from a 
careful study of the emotional states in 


a little child, two striking facts appear. 


190 Ube Evolution of Man. 


In the first place, there are almost no 
emotions in the child which are not 
here—this list, in short, practically ex- 
hausts the list of human emotions. 
With the exception of the religious 
feelings, the moral sense, and the per- 
ception of the sublime, there is nothing 
found, even in adult Man, which is not 
represented with more or less vividness 
in the Animal Kingdom. But this is 
not all. These emotions, as already 
hinted, appear in the mind of the grow- 
ing child 27 the same order as they ap- 
pear on the animal scale. At three weeks, 
for instauce; Fear is perceptibly mani- 


fest in a little child. When it is seven 


The Evolution of Mind. 191 


weeks old the Social affections dawn 
At twelve weeks emerges Jealousy, with 
its companion Anger. Sympathy ap- 
pears after five months ; Pride, Resent- 
ment, Love of Ornament after eight ; 
Shame, Remorse, and Sense of the 
Ludicrous after fifteen. ‘These dates, of 
course, do not indicate in any mechani- 
cal way the birthdays of evolution ; they 
represent rather stages in an infinitely 
gentle mental ascent, stages nevertheless 
so marked that we are able to give them 
names, and use them as landmarks in 
psychogenesis. Yet taken even as rep- 
resenting a rough order, it is a circum- 


stance to which too much significance 


192 The Evolution of Man. 


cannot be attached—that the tree of 
mind as we know it in Lower Nature, 
and the tree of mind as we know it in 
a little child should be the same tree, 
starting its roots at the same place, and 
though by no means ending its branches 
at the same level, at least growing them 
so far in a parallel direction. 

If we turn from emotional to intellec- 
tual development, the parallel line, 
though much more faint, is at least 
shadowed. Again we find a list of in- 
tellectual products common to both 
Animal and Man, and again an approxi- 
mate order common to both. It is true 


Man’s development beyond the highest 


The Evolution of Mind. 193 


point attained by any animal in the 
region of the intellect is all but infinite. 
Of rational thought he has the whole 
monopoly. Wherever the roots of mind 
be, there is no uncertainty as to where, 
and where exclusively, the higher 
branches are. But. grant that the 
mental faculties of Man and Animal 
part company at a point, there remains 
to consider the vast distance—in the 
case of the emotions almost the whole 
distance—where they run parallel with 
one another. Why should the Mind 
thus recapitulate in its development the 
psychic life of animals unless some vital 


link connected them? Comparative 
13 


194 The Evolution of Man. 


Psychology is not so advanced a science 
_ as Comparative Embryology; yet no one 
who has felt the force of the recapitula- 
tion argument for the evolution of bodily 
function, even making all allowances for 
the differences of the things compared, 
will deny some weight to the corre- 
sponding argument for the evolution of 
Mind. 

A singular complement to this argu- 
ment has been suggested recently— 
though as yet only in the form of the 
dimmest hint from the side of Mental 
Pathology. When the Mind is affected 
by certain diseases, its progress down- 


ward can often be followed step by step. 


The Evolution of Mind, 195 


It does not tumble down in a moment 
into chaos, like a house of cards, but in 
a definite order, stone by stone, or 
story by story. Now the striking thing 
about that “orde#'1s,o' that’ it's + the 
probable order in which the building 
has gone up. ‘The order of descent, in 
short, is the inverse of the order of 
ascent. The first faculty to go,in many 
cases of insanity, is the last faculty 
which arrived; the next faculty is 
affected next ; the whole spring uncoil- 
ing as it were in the order and direc- 
tion in which, presumably, it had been 
wound up. 

That the highest part of Man should 


196 The Evolution of Man. 


totter first is what, on the theory of 
mental evolution, one would already 
have expected. ‘The highest part is the 
last added part, and the latest added 
part is the least secured part. As the 
last arrival, it is not yet at home; it has 
not had time to get lastingly imbedded 
in the brain; the competition of older 
faculties is against it; the hold of the 
will upon it is slight and fitful; its 
tenure as a tenant is precarious and 
often threatened. Among the older 
and more permanent residents therefore 
it has little chance. Hence, if anything 
goes wrong, as the last added, the most 


complex, the least automatic of all the 


The Evolution of Mind. 197 


functions, it is the first to suffer. We 
are but too familiar with cases where 
men of lofty intellect and women of 
purest mind, seized in the awful grasp 
of madness, are transformed in a few 
brief months into beings worse than 
brutes. How are we to account, on any 
other principle than this, for that most 
shocking of all catastrophes, the sudden 
and total break up, the devolutzon of a 
saint ? 

It is a favorite expedient with some 
evolutionists to assert that at this point 
some special interposition of a creative 
hand must have taken place. ‘his is 


Mr. Wallace’s opinion, and it is that of 


198 The Evolution of Aan. 


many theologians. It is a perfectly 
scientific hypothesis, for science has no 
account whatever of the origin of Mind 
except that it be a Divine in-breathing. 
But there seems no necessity to believe 
that that which we describe by the 
metaphor in-breathing was a sudden 
and unrelated act. While there is only 
one theory of origins in the field there 
is only one theory of process in the field, 
and that is evolution. And while there 
is nothing against a per-saltum evolu- 
tion in the case of Mind, one gains 
nothing for theism by insisting on it too 
rigidly. Those who yield to the ten- 


dency to reserve a point here and there 


The Evolution of Mind. 199 


for special Divine interposition are 
scarcely aware that this virtually ex- 
cludes God from the rest of the process. 
If God appears periodically, He dis- 
appears periodically. If He comes upon 
the scene at special crises, He is absent 
from the scene in the interval. Whether 
is all-God, or occasional-God, the nobler 
theory? And as to facts, the daily 
miracle of a flower, the upholding and 
sustaining of all living things, needs 
God as much as the creation of matter. 
If by the accumulation of irresistible 
evidence we are driven to accept Evo- 
lution as God’s method in creation, it is 


a mistaken policy to glory in what it 


200 The Evolution of Man. 


cannot account for. The reason why 
some men grudge Evolution, grudge 
each of its fresh claims to show how 
things have been made, seems simply to 
be the fear that if we discover how they 
are made we minimize their divinity. 
That is to say, when things are known, 
they are human, natural, on man’s level ; 
and these men want something unknown, 
in order to call it divine, as if our ignor- 
ance of a thing were the stamp of its 
divinity. If God is only to be left to the 
gaps in our knowledge, what is to hap- 
pen when these gaps are filled up? 

A miracle is not ‘‘something quick.” 


It may be that on the physical side it is 


The Evolution of Mind. 201 


a more or less clear or a more or less 
dark chain of causes and effects. It 
may be that the doing of it may come 
to seem to us no miracle. Nevertheless 


it is a miracle because it has been done. 


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Che Evolution of Language. 


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Che Evolution of Language. 


ONE of the most remarkable gaps in 
Nature is between the brain of Man 
and that of his nearest ally among the 
lower animals. Mind burst out in an 
almost sudden efflorescence. When 
the question comes to be asked, What 
brought about this sudden rise in in- 
telligence? there is a wonderful unan- 
imity among men of science as to the 
answer. It came about in connection 


with the acquisition by mau of the power 
(205) 


206 Ebe Evolution of Man, 


to express his intelligence, that is, to 
Speak.» ‘The condition of all growth is 
exercise, and till man could find a 
further field and a larger opportunity 
to work what little brains he had, he 
had little chance of getting more. Now 
speech gave him this opportunity, and 
in other more important ways supplied 
the conditions of mental development. 

It is a growing belief indeed that to 
the invention of language we almost 
owe the Evolution of Mind. It at 
least gave an impetus to the progress 
of the human species which nothing else 
did or could have done. 


Evolution, up to this time, had only 


The Evolution of Language. 207 


one way of banking the gains it won— 
heredity. To hand on any improve- 
ment physically was a slow and preca- 
rious work. If the gain was small, it 
would be so small in the heir as to be of 
little account in giving it an advantage 
in the struggle for life ; if it was great, 
it might be too abnormal for safety, and 
in any case unless it was carried off 


‘‘ physiological isolation’’ in a few 


into 
generations inter-marriage would have 
called it back and reduced the organism 
to the average level of the species. 

But now there was a new method of 
passing on a step in progress. Instead 


of sowing the gain on the wind of 


208 The Evolution of dan. 


heredity, it was fastened on the wings 
of words! Before the savage’s son was 
ten years old he knew all that his father 
knew. The ways of the game, the 
habits of birds and fish, the traps and 
snares—all these would be explained. 
The physical environment, the changes 
of season, the location of hostile tribes, 
the strategies of war, all the details and 
interests of savage life would receive 
expression. And before the boy was in 
his teens he was equipped for the Strug- 
gle for Life as his forefathers had never 
been even in old age. This at least 
was time saved. The son started to 


evolve where his father left off Try 


The Evolution of Language. 209 


to realize what it would be for each of 
us to begin life afresh, to be able to 
learn nothing by the experiences of 
others, to live in a dumb and illiterate 
world, not knowing enough even to 
recognize the advantage of pantomime, 
and we can see what chance the animal 
had of making pronounced progress 
until the acquisition of speech. It is 
not too much to say that speech, if men- 
tal evolution is to come to anything or 
is to be worth anything, is a necessary 
condition. 

The evolution of Language is one of 
the easiest studies in development. 


Before Homo sapiens was evolved, he 
14 


210 The Evolution of Aan. 


was necessarily preceded for a longer 
or shorter period by Homo alalus, the 
not-speaking man. If Evolution is the 
method of Creation, the faculty of 
speech was no sudden gift; man’s 
mind was not the cylinder of a phono- 
graph to which ready-made words were 
spoken and stored up for future use ; | 
Man had to make his words, and _ be- 
ginning with dumb signs and inarticu- 
late cries to build up a body of language 
word by word as the body was built up 
cell by cell. 

The only condition of understanding 
the process is, that we take it up asa - 


study from the life, that we place our- 


The Evolution of Language. 211 


selves in the primeval forest with early 
man, in touch with the actual scenes in 
which he lived, and that we note the’ 
real experiences and necessities of such 
a lot. 

One of early man’s first discoveries 
was the power of numbers. Instead of 
prowling about the beast-infested forest 
alone, he came to form part of a 
family or tribe or clan, and had thus 
the advantage in the struggle for life 
which the gregarious state affords to all 
creatures. that have hit upon this idea. 
What is that advantage? Partly the 
mere animal strength of the combina- 


tion, but, partly also, and much more 


212 The Evolution of dian. 


important, its mental strength. Every 
man in the tribe now shares the power 
of observation of every other man; he 
has as many eyes as the tribe, as many 
ears, his nervous system extends 
throughout the whole space the tribe 
covers—provided one thing be added: 
some power of conversation. Here isa 
herd of deer, scattered, as they love to 
be, in a string a quarter of a mile long. 
If these deer by signs of head or foot, 
or neck, or ear, by any motion or by 
any sound, can pass on the news that 
you are about, each deer has a quarter 
of a mile of nerves, several hundred 


eyes and as many ears and noses. Num- 


Tbe Evolution of Language. 213 


bers are strength, but only when 
strength is coupled with communica- 
tion by signs. 

Whenever we find animals living in 
_ close association with one another, some 
system of communication prevails 
among them. ‘The mere fact that they 
are together proves that they communi- 
cate. Among the ants, perhaps the 
most social of the lower animals, this 
power is so perfect that they are not 
merely endowed with a few general | 
signs, but seem able to communicate 
upon matters of detail. Sweeping across 
country in great armies they keep up 


communication throughout the whole 


214 The Evolution of Man, 


line, and succeed in conveying to one 
another information as to the easiest 
route, the presence of enemies or ob- 
stacles, the discovery of food supplies, 
and even of the numbers required on 
emergencies to leave the main band for 
any special service. 

Everybody has observed ants stop 
when they meet one another and ex- 
change a rapid greeting by means of 
their waving antennz, and there can be 
no doubt that it is through these per- 
plexing organs that definite intercourse 
between one creature and another first 
entered the world. ‘The exact nature 


of the antenna-language is not yet 


The Evolution of Language. 215 - 


fathomed, but the perfection to which 
it is carried proves that the idea of 
language generally has existed in nature 
from the earliest time. Among higher 
animals various outward expressions of 
emotions are made. ‘The howl of the 
dog, the neigh of the horse, the bleat 
of the lamb, the stamp of the goat, and 
other signs are all readily understood 
by other animals. One monkey utters 
at least six different sounds to express 
its feelings; and Mr. Darwin has de- 
tected four or five modulations in the 
bark of the dog. 

Now these signs are as much language 


as spoken words. Any method of com- 


216 The Evolution of Man. 


munication is language, and to under- 
stand language we must first fix in our 
minds the idea that it has no necessary 
connection with actual words. In the 
simple instances just given there are 
illustrations of at least three kinds of 
language. Whena deer throws up its 
head suddenly, all the other deer throw 
up their heads. That is a sign. It 
means ‘‘listen.’’ If the first deer sees 
the object which has called its attention 
to be suspicious, it utters a low note. 
That is a word. It means ‘‘caution.” 
If next it sees the object to be not only 
suspicious but dangerous, it makes a 


further use of language—intonation. 


The Evolution of Language. aVe 


Instead of the low note, ‘‘listen,’’ it 
utters a.sharp, loud cry that means ‘‘ run 
for your life.’’ Hence these three kinds 
of language—a sign, a note, an intona- 
tion. The first of these was the first 
human language. It is still largely 
used by savage tribes. The Red In- 
dians can communicate with other 
tribes without the use of more than a 
few grunts. 

From the gesture-language to mix- 
tures of signs and sounds, and finally to 
the specialization of sound, is a neces- 
sary transition. A sign language is no 
use when one savage is at one end of a 


wood and his wife at the other. He 


218 The Evolution of Man. 


must now roar; and to make his roar 
explicit, he must have a vocabulary of 
roars and of all shades of roars. In the 
darkness of night also his signs are out 
of count, and he must now whisper and > 
have a vocabulary of whispers. 

Everything around him that conveyed 
any impression of sound would have 
associated with it some self-expressive 
word which both could understand ; the 
sighing of the wind, the flowing of the 
stream, the beat of the surf, the call of 
the bird, and so on. 

Once the idea had dawned of ex- 
pressing meaning by sounds the forma- 


tion of words is a mere detail. We 


The Evolution of Language. 219 


have probably all invented words. Al- 
most every family of children invents 
words of its own. Cases are known 
where quite considerable languages 
have been manufactured in the nursery. 

The construction of the mouth and 
lips has had something to do with dif- 
ferences in languages and even with the 
possibility of language. You must have 
your trumpet before you can get the 
sound of a trumpet. One reason why 
many animals have no speech is simply 
that they have not the mechanism which 
by any possibility could produce it. 
They might have a language, but noth- 


ing at all like human language. It is 


220 Tbe Evolution of Man. 


one of the significant notes in Evolution 
that man, almost alone among verte- 
brates, has a material. body so far de- 
veloped as to make it an available in- 
strument for speech, and there was 
almost certainly a time when this was 
to him a physical impossibility. 
Articulate speech became possible to 
man only when the alveolar arch and 
‘palatine, area became shortened and 
widened, and when his tongue became 
shorter and more horizontally flattened. 
Even for differences in dialect there is a 
physical basis. With the macrodont 
alveolar arch and the corresponding 


modified tongue, sibilation is difficult, 


The Evolution of Language. 931 


and the sibilant sounds are almost un- 
known in many dialects. From speech 
the next transition was to writing, 
which passed through the same stages 
—signs, words, accents. Then came 
the telegraph and the telephone. Theo- 
retically, the next stage in Evolution is 


telepathy. 


Uigay 
aon 
Diehh, 





Che Evolution of Ser. 


4 bey mn oi! 


A 


wens ne HOR, au 


; 


ae ca bru OE af oe SE nite Bi 


ah ik 
ft 


es Vet 


sive 


at 
= 


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iets eysihe HLL OTS agli 
TOK bod ‘6, Biles jak meet 


. * 


oil | rows he CBS 


* 


wile 2, dant Sead ait 


. = Bb sts anols. x bod &, Aim 


> i 


cs 4g: e cpa 


ee) Be 


ebi bie bus, a ua ath oe 


rm ay 5 a a 





Che Evolution of Ser. 


A WHOLLY new chapter in the Evolu- 
tion of man has now to be opened. 
Up to this time we have found a body 
for Man, and the rudiments of Mind. 
But man is not a body, nor a mind. 
In these man cannot even live. ‘The 
temple still awaits its final tenant, the 
soul. With a body alone, man is an 
animal; the highest animal, yet a pure 
animal, struggling for its own narrow 


life, living for its small and sordid ends. 
15 (225) 


226 The Evolution of Man. 


Add a Mind to that, and you get an in- 
finite advance. 

The struggle for Life assumes the 
high shape of a struggle for light; he 
who was once a savage pursuing the 
arts of the chase becomes what Aris- 
totle defines man to be—‘‘a hunter after 
Truth ;’? the animal thirst is trans- 
formed into a thirst for learning. Yet 
this is not the end. Noman lives upon 
light, no human thirst is satisfied with 
truth or learning. These are parts of 
man’s life, but not his true life. Man’s 
true life is neither lived in the material 
tracts of the body, nor in the chilly re- 


gions of the intellect, but in the warm 


Tbe Evolution of Ser. Q07 


world of the affections. Tull he is 
equipped with these, man is not human. 
Equipped with these, he is more than 
human. He reaches his full height 
only when these become to him the 
breath of life, the energy of his will, the 
summit of his desire. 

As the story of Evolution is often 
told, Love has no place. The chief 
emphasis of science falls upon the op- 
posite—the animal struggle for life. 
Hunger was seen by the early natural- 
ists to be the first and most imperious 
appetite of all living things, and the 
course of nature was interpreted in 


terms of a ceaseless struggle. Since 


228 The Evolution of Man. 


there are vastly more creatures born 
than can ever survive, since for every 
morsel of food provided a hundred 
claimants appear, life to an animal is 
described to us as one long tragedy, and 
Nature as a blood-red fang. But the 
struggle for food is not the only function 
of living things. Creation is a drama, 
and no drama was ever put upon the 
stage with only one actor. 

There are ¢wo functions, two main 
functions, discharged by all living 
things—Nutrition and Reproducizon. 
The first aims at the life of the indi- 
vidual, the second at the life of the 


species. ‘The first is self-regarding, the 


Tbe Evolution of Sex. 299 


second is other-regarding. All that is 
greatest in the world has come along 
the line of this second function. 

Love is not an after-thought with 
Creation,...It..is not a novelty ofa 
romantic civilization. It is not a mere 
pious word of religion. Its roots began 
to grow with the first cell of life which 
budded on the earth. How great it is, 
how old it is, how bound up with the 
very constitution of the world, science 
is only now beginning to appreciate. 

The first chapter in the Evolution of 
Love was the Evolution of Sex. Not 


that love was an outcome of the sex- 


230 The Evolution of Man. 


relation, but the creation of sex was in- 
directly necessary to it. | 

The grand work of evolution in re- 
gard to sex is the position that sex dis- 
tinctions are differentiations from early 
individuals who combined the functions 
of sex in one example. In botany the 
plants yet present examples where the 
differentiation has not taken place. 
The bearing of this proposition on the 
evolution of society is that the male 
and female are equal divisions from a 
parent stem, and that no inequality of 
abilities or rights exists in this division 
by nature. It is a partition of varied 


functions, but one nature lies under all. 


The Evolution of Ser. 231 


In social evolution the sexes may 
therefore expect to see an increasing 
reciprocity, and yet more applied skill 
in the divided labors of a world where 
every special gift is intensified and 
strengthened by the multiplication of 


demands for its use. 





The Evolution of a Mother. 


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east hes ns 
ain tows olan 1 


cheete 


oe Bhils ; ealaes "4 


3 


Si 2 Lerten ee 


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live 


por ‘bas «aaa 


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8 0. 1 a4 ‘aioillian 


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Che Evolution of a Mother. 


THE Evolution of ‘a mother—which 
means the evolution of sympathy, care, 
and love—was one of the most stupen- 
dous tasks ever undertakén by nature. 
It involved a complete reversal of the 
older order, and required the bringing 
about of at least four fundamental 
changes. | 

In the first place the number of young 
produced at a birth had to be slowly 


reduced from millions to one. ‘The fe- 
(235) 


236 The Lvotution of “ban, 
cundity in the lower stages of plant and 
animal~-life was prodigious. Crypto- 
grams produced countless millions of 
spores, and even creatures so high as 
the fishes spawned with scarcely less 
fertility. The reason of this is that 
these forms were otherwise defenceless, 
and had to be created in vast numbers 
to prevent extinction. 

Maternal care in these cases was out 
of the question—no mother could lovea 


million—so that before this could be- 
come possible the numbers had to be 


reduced to hundreds, as among the rep- 
tiles, or to a score, as in some birds, and 


so gradually to one or two, as ainong the 


The Evolution of a Motber. 237 


higher mammals. ‘Till this change was 
effected there was no maternal care in 
the world. There was great solicitude 
among insects and others for the egg, 
but that was a different thing from care 
of the young. A second change was in 
the form in which the young appeared 
whien born. In lower nature the young 
have no resemblance whatever to their 
parents ; but the likeness becomes more 
marked as we ascend. ‘The young were 
gradually delayed in birth, so that by- 
and-by they only appeared when they 
were recognizable. A third change was 


to compel them to remain by their 


938 Tbe Evolution of man. 


parent’s side long enough to make the 
mother care for them. 

There were no children in lower 
nature; there were only off-spring, 
| springers-off, the young forsaking the 
parent at the moment of birth, and set- 
ting up an independent life from the 
first. But with the physiological ar-— 
rangements which culminated in the 
Mammalia, the young were forced to 
remain with their mothers for months 
or years. The mother also—and this 
was the fourth change—was compelled 
by the physiological necessities of lacta- 
tion to remain in company with her 


young, and thus the physical basis of 


The Evolution of a Motber. 239 


the family was laid. ‘Then followed the 
ethical stages. With the lengthening 
of infancy in the human subject—a pro- 
cess required for the due fitting up of 
the complex mental apparatus, and 
needed by no other animal—time was 
given for care to ripen into sympathy, 
and sympathy into love. 

The entire basis of the social and 
moral life is physical, and all these 
preparations in nature had an ethical 
end. It is a fact to which too little 
significance has been given that the 
whole work of organic nature culmi- 
nates in the making of Mothers—that 


the animal series end with a group 


240 The Evolution of Man. 


which even the naturalist has been 
forced’ to call the Mammalha. When 
the savage mother awoke to her first 
tenderness, a new creative hand was at 


work in the world. 


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(243) 











